Top 70 Jane Addams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.”

— Jane Addams

2. “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

— Jane Addams

3. “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.”

— Jane Addams

4. “The things that make us alike are stronger and finer than the things that make us different.”

— Jane Addams

5. “What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them?”

— Jane Addams

6. “Keep friends close but keep enemies closer.”

— Jane Addams

7. “Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.”

— Jane Addams

8. “We forget that the accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to life itself.”

— Jane Addams

9. “Of all aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.”

— Jane Addams

10. “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.”

— Jane Addams

11. “We stand today united in a belief in beauty, genius, and courage, and that these can transform the world.”

— Jane Addams

12. “That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.”

— Jane Addams

13. “It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.”

— Jane Addams

14. “Young people need pleasure as truly as they need food and air.”

— Jane Addams

15. “A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage.”

— Jane Addams

16. “Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.”

— Jane Addams

17. “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.”

— Jane Addams

18. “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.”

— Jane Addams

19. “Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party.”

— Jane Addams

20. “Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand.”

— Jane Addams

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

— Jane Addams

22. “We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burdens.”

— Jane Addams

23. “The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself.”

— Jane Addams

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

— Jane Addams

25. “National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.”

— Jane Addams

26. “When the entire moral energy of an individual goes into the cultivation of personal integrity, we all know how unlovely the result may become; the character is upright, of course, but too coated over with the result of its own endeavor to be attractive.”

— Jane Addams

27. “It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep...”

— Jane Addams

28. “That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.”

— Jane Addams

29. “Pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment.”

— Jane Addams

30. “To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one’s self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.”

— Jane Addams

31. “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.”

— Jane Addams

32. “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.”

— Jane Addams

33. “The cheap drama brings cause and effect, will power and action, once more into relation and gives a man the thrilling conviction that he may yet be master of his fate.”

— Jane Addams

34. “The blessing which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent.”

— Jane Addams

35. “But the paradox is here: when cultivated people do stay away from a certain portion of the population, when all social advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument for the continued withholding.”

— Jane Addams

36. “Must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”

— Jane Addams

37. “No one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most.”

— Jane Addams

38. “Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.”

— Jane Addams

39. “Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s disinherited.”

— Jane Addams

40. “The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels.”

— Jane Addams

41. “With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!”

— Jane Addams

42. “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.”

— Jane Addams

43. “The rich landlord is he who collects with sternness, who accepts no excuse, and will have his own. There are moments of irritation and of real bitterness against him, but there is still admiration, because he is rich and successful.”

— Jane Addams

44. “In this effort toward a higher morality in our social relations, we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many.”

— Jane Addams

45. “A wise man has told us that “men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in.””

— Jane Addams

46. “All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to act upon them.”

— Jane Addams

47. “Life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole.”

— Jane Addams

48. “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.”

— Jane Addams

49. “A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted.”

— Jane Addams

50. “I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.”

— Jane Addams