55+ Jane Addams Quotes From The Influential American Activist

Jane Addams was an American social reformer, pacifist, and also the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her peace activism.

Born on 6 September, 1860, Addams had always been a keen learner. After graduating at the top of her class, she wanted to use her education for greater use and thus co-founded 'The Hull House'- the first settlement house of America which enabled educated women to share their knowledge and skills.

As a social worker and a sociologist, she promoted the idea of world peace. She could under each problem that we as a community faced and her quotations bring that essence out to the open.

She had her idea of a good community living in peace. This list of Jane Addams Quotes includes her best quotes on women's issues, politics along with many other inspiring quotes from her publishes works such as 'Twenty Years At Hull House, 'Democracy And Social Ethics', among others.

If you like this article, you can check out women's rights quotes and Gloria Steinem quotes.

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Top Jane Addams Quotes On Women

Jane Addams was way ahead of her time and spoke about the important role played by women. As a sociologist, author, philosopher, and social worker, she understood the plight of women in the face of systemic oppression.

1. "We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing."

-Jane Addams.

2. "A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage."

-Jane Addams.

3. "A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping... may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?"

-Jane Addams.

4. "Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party."

-Jane Addams.

5. "I am not one of those who believe - broadly speaking - that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance."

-Jane Addams.

6. "Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled."

-Jane Addams.

7. "Many women today are failing properly to discharge their duties to their own families and household simply because they fail to see that as society grows more complicated it is necessary that women shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her home, if only to preserve the home in entirety."

-Jane Addams.

8. "The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed."

-Jane Addams.

9. "With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!"

-Jane Addams.

Jane Addams Quotes On Democracy, Ethics And Politics

Jane Addams quotes are interesting. These are some great Jane Addams quotes.

10. "All about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard to their attitude toward the social order itself"

-Jane Addams.

11. "Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics."

-Jane Addams.

12. "We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith."

-Jane Addams.

13. "This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of public officials was made clear to us in an early experience with a peasant woman straight from the fields of Germany, whom we met during our first six months at Hull-House."

-Jane Addams.

14. "Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited."

-Jane Addams.

15. "We revolted not only against the cruelty and barbarity of war, but even more against the reversal of human relationships which war implied."

-Jane Addams.

16. "We had almost forgotten what it was like to be in a neutral country where it entailed no odium to be a pacifist."

-Jane Addams.

17. "If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights, then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights."

-Jane Addams.

18. "We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens."

-Jane Addams.

'Twenty Years At Hull House' Jane Addams Quotes

This is a compelling published work by Jane Addams, which includes Jane Addams women's suffrage quotes and other Jane Addams famous quotes.

19. "On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that 'No-Man's Land' where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this record with some impressions of my childhood."

-Jane Addams.

20. "Would it not provoke to ironic laughter that very nemesis which presides over the destinies of nations, if the most autocratic government yet remaining in civilization should succeed in utilizing for its own autocratic methods the youngest and most daring experiment in democratic government which the world has ever seen?"

-Jane Addams.

21. "The Settlement House must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy."

-Jane Addams.

22. "Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward."

-Jane Addams.

23. "In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life."

-Jane Addams.

24. "But stranger than any episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife, nor his godfather for a moment considered him a criminal."

-Jane Addams.

25. "It has been pointed out many times that Art lives by devouring her own offspring and the world has come to justify even that sacrifice."

-Jane Addams.

26. "The Settlement is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city."

-Jane Addams.

27. "Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself. "

-Jane Addams.

Inspiring Jane Addams Quotes

Jane Addams' forward thinking is an inspiration to many. She wrote 'Peace And Bread In Time of War', 'Newer Ideals Of Peace', and many more inspirational books. There are several quotes in these and they can lend a different view of the woman and her world.

28. "The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life."

-Jane Addams.

29. "The mass of men seldom move together without an emotional incentive."

-Jane Addams.

30. "This dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth."

-Jane Addams.

31. "What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved."

-Jane Addams.

32. "True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice."

-Jane Addams

33. "An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply low rental."

-Jane Addams.

34. "The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself."

-Jane Addams.

35. "That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons."

-Jane Addams.

36. "The excellent becomes the permanent."

-Jane Addams.

37. "Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men."

-Jane Addams.

38. "What after all has maintained the human race on this old Globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities and courage to advocate them."

-Jane Addams.

39. "We forget that the accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to life itself."

-Jane Addams.

40. "The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it."

-Jane Addams.

41. "One's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relation."

-Jane Addams.

42. "We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment."

-Jane Addams.

43. "The blessing which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent."

-Jane Addams.

44. "Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others."

-Jane Addams.

45. "Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world."

-Jane Addams.

46. "The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels..."

-Jane Addams.

47. "Life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations."

-Jane Addams.

48. "The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress."

-Jane Addams.

49. "You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!"

-Jane Addams.

50. "Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans."

-Jane Addams.

51. "The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life."

-Jane Addams.

52. "Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age."

-Jane Addams.

53. "Pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment"

-Jane Addams.

54. "To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation."

-Jane Addams.

55. "To follow the path of social morality results perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, for it implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy."

-Jane Addams.

56. "Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation."

-Jane Addams.

57. "The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its philanthropic, civic, and social undertakings, are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement itself."

-Jane Addams.

58. "We realized that it is only the ardent spirits, the lovers of mankind, who can break down the suspicion and lack of understanding which have so long prevented the changes upon which international good order depend."

-Jane Addams.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Jane Addams quotes, then why not take a look at women's history month quotes, or activism quotes.

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