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Quote by Jane Addams

“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.”

Quote by Jane Addams

Work

The Jane Addams Reader

This reader offers a comprehensive look into the work of Jane Addams, a prominent social reformer and peace activist. It includes a selection of her most influential essays, speeches, and personal correspondence, providing insight into her efforts to improve the lives of the underprivileged and her commitment to social justice and peace. The collection highlights Addams' role in the settlement house movement and her contributions to the women's suffrage and labor movements. more

Author

Jane Addams
Jane Addams

Jane Addams, an American sociologist, was born on September 6, 1860, and died on May 21, 1935. She was a pioneer in the American social reform movement, known for her focus on the impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side. Addams was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and her work had a profound impact on improving social services and promoting social justice. more

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“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 draught would not carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and jostle of the crowd.”

“What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”