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.
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.
Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.
Spirit is never without matter, matter is never without spirit.
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too _x000D_ I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
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