Quotes by Jane Addams

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

“Action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics. (U.S. Social Worker, 1860-1935)””

“If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights. ””

“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.””

“Nothing can be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort which might have saved the world.””

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

“It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy’s phrase “the snare of preparation,” which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.””

“It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless.””

“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.””

“The Hebrew prophet made three requirements from those who would join the great forward-moving procession led by Jehovah. “To love mercy” and at the same time “to do justly” is the difficult task; to fulfil the first requirement alone is to fall into the error of indiscriminate giving with all its disastrous results; to fulfil the second solely is to obtain the stern policy of withholding, and it results in such a dreary lack of sympathy and understanding that the establishment of justice is impossible. It may be that the combination of the two can never be attained save as we fulfil still the third requirement”