Jane Addams was a primary figure in the women’s suffrage in America. Born in 1860 in Illinois, she was an activist and reformer who challenged many social norms prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries that discriminated against women.
She worked towards empowering women across the world and was adamant that women must be given equal rights as men. She uttered several quotes during her lifetime that shared a liberal perspective on the concurrent structure of the society. The 60 best quotes of her is listed below:
1. “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
2. “The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.”– Jane Addams
3. “The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.”– Jane Addams
4. “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
5. “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”– Jane Addams
6. “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
7. “The identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is as though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent drought would not carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and jostle of the crowd.”– Jane Addams
8. “We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by traveling 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
9. “It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.”– Jane Addams
10. “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
11. “We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by traveling 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
12. “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, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory.”– Jane Addams
13. “Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.”– Jane Addams
14. “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
15. “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
16. “Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.”– Jane Addams
17. “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
18. “The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels, but in that case there must be something vital to rebel against and if the elderly stiffly refuse to put up a vigorous front of their own, it leaves the entire situation in a mist.”– Jane Addams
19. “If in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave.”– Jane Addams
20. “Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.”– Jane Addams
21. “If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong; but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him.”– Jane Addams
22. “We all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have “arrived” when in reality we have not yet started.”– Jane Addams
23. “Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.”– Jane Addams
24. “The lessons of great men are lost unless they reinforce upon our minds the highest demands which we make upon ourselves … they are lost unless they drive our sluggish wills forward in the direction of their highest ideals.”– Jane Addams
25. “In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.”– Jane Addams
26. “A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage.”– Jane Addams
27. “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
28. “Life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole.”– Jane Addams
29. “Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.”– Jane Addams
30. “A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations.”– Jane Addams
31. “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
32. “We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life’s very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should be effective against them.”– Jane Addams
33. “I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.”– Jane Addams
34. “The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment–for the remedying of social ills.”– Jane Addams
35. “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
36. “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
37. “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
38. “I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process.”– Jane Addams
39. “America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.”– Jane Addams
40. “Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.”– Jane Addams
41. “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
42. “As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be.”– Jane Addams
43. “Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.”– Jane Addams
44. “That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.”– Jane Addams
45. “Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.”– Jane Addams
46. “True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.”– Jane Addams
47. “The lessons of great men and women are lost unless they reinforce upon our minds the highest demands which we make upon ourselves; they are lost unless they drive our sluggish wills forward in the direction of their highest ideas.”– Jane Addams
48. “Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.”– Jane Addams
49. “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
50. “You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!”– Jane Addams
51. “Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.”– Jane Addams
52. “When the sense of justice seeks to express itself quite outside the regular channels of established government, it has set forth on a dangerous journey inevitably ending in disaster.”– Jane Addams
53. “National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.”– Jane Addams
54. “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
55. “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
56. “It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.”– Jane Addams
57. “The relationship of students and faculty to each other and to the residents was that of guest and hostess and at the close of each term the residents gave a reception to students and faculty which was one of the chief social events of the season. Upon this comfortable social basis some very good work was done.”– Jane Addams
58. “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
59. “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
60. “The excellent becomes the permanent.”– Jane Addams
