National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.
Interpretation
Our values and beliefs shape national events while those events, in turn, shape our values.
Jane Addams highlights the reciprocal relationship between national events and societal ideals. This quote emphasizes that the collective values held by society can influence the course of significant national happenings, while those events can also redefine and evolve those very ideals, creating a continuous feedback loop in the social fabric.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of civic engagement, one might use this quote to illustrate how community values impact local governance.
I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.
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.
Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.
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.
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.
If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
There is no partial sensitivity; either it is the state of one's whole being, total consciousness or it is not there at all
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither; one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.
How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.
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