Pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment. — Jane Addams

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand. — Jane Addams

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. — Jane Addams

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

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

One’s faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations. — Jane Addams

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

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

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. — Jane Addams

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

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

A long–established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament. — Jane Addams

You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! — Jane Addams

Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others. — Jane Addams

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

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

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

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

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. — Jane Addams

As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be. — Jane Addams

Of all aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment. — Jane Addams

The supreme religious test of our social order is the hideous commerce of prostitution. — Jane Addams

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself. — Jane Addams

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

If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse. — Jane Addams

The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress. — Jane Addams

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

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

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