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The lessons of great men and women are lost unless they reinforce upon our minds the highest demands which we make upon ourselves they are lost unless they drive our sluggish wills forward in the direction of their highest ideas.

Jane Addams

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Jane Addams
Age: 74 †
Born: 1860
Born: September 6
Died: 1935
Died: June 21
Autobiographer
Feminist
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Political Theorist
Social Critic
Social Reformer
Laura Jane Addams
Dzheyn Edems
Make
Unless
Demands
Men
Wisdom
Drive
Upon
Direction
Lost
Minds
Women
Lessons
Ideas
Forward
Reinforce
Great
Demand
Sluggish
Mind
Highest
Wills

More quotes by Jane Addams

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When the sense of justice seeks to express itself quite outside the regular channels of established government, it has set forth on a dangerous journey inevitably ending in disaster.
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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.
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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.
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Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
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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.
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If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage.
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The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed.
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We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.
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This dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.
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The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
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As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so it has its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is the curious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to the whole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune.
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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.
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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