Explore Quotes by Jane Addams

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

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

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.

Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.

Only in time of fear is government thrown back to its primitive and sole function of self-defense and the many interests of which it is the guardian become subordinate to that.

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.

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.