Jane Addams

It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child’s adoring affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the affairs of the imagination.

It is as easy for most of us to keep from stealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much voluntary morality involved in one process as in the other.

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.

We have learned as common knowledge that 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.

That old-fashioned habit of presenting favorite books to eager young people, although it degenerated into the absurdity of “friendship’s offerings,” had much to be said for it, when it indicated the wellsprings of literature from which the donor himself had drawn waters of healing and inspiration.

Our democratic instinct instantly takes alarm.

This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes.

The spontaneous impulse to sit up all night with the neighbor’s sick child is turned into righteous indignation against the district nurse, because she goes home at six o’clock, and doesn’t do it herself.

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.

Her clothes are her background, and from them she is largely judged.

But Hull House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of expression that has peculiar value.

“Well, we had fun anyway, and maybe they will let us dig a cave at the School; it is in the country, where we can’t hurt anything.”

Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race.

It is certainly dangerous to break down the lower, unless the higher is made clear.

Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered vitality and discontent.

Viewed in an historic light, this employer might quite as well have added a bay to her house for her shoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live in it.

The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the most astounding Rome had ever seen.

To perform too many good deeds may be to lose the power of recognizing good in others; to be too absorbed in carrying out a personal plan of improvement may be to fail to catch the great moral lesson which our times offer.

It must, in a sense, give the warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, if perchance one of them be found an angel.

It is as though nets were laid at the entrance to education, in which those who by some means or other escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught and held from substantial service to their fellows.