Jane Addams Quotes on Politics
Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), and Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) gave Progressive Era American political philosophy its most influential statement of social democracy as a way of life. The central commitment, developed across the Hull-House settlement Addams co-founded with Ellen Gates Starr in Chicago in 1889, is that genuine democratic citizenship requires the daily practice of social interaction across class, ethnic, and gender lines — democratic ethics is not the formal pattern of representative institutions but the substantive interpenetration of differently situated lives in the institutions of the actual urban-industrial city. The framework, integrating American pragmatism (Addams’s correspondence with John Dewey shaped both their developing positions), Christian social-gospel commitments, and the early sociology of the Chicago school, shaped Progressive Era social and political philosophy and supplied the principal early statement of the philosophy of social democracy in American thought.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jane Addams:
“Democracy is not a form of government, but a way of life.”
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“Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all.”
Speech, Honolulu (1933), quoted in The Encarta Book of Quotations (2000) edited by Bill Swainson, page 6, Inscribed in stone at the Chicago Public Library reading garden. -
Attributed to Jane Addams:
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious until secured for all.”
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Attributed to Jane Addams:
“Old morality is too narrow to give us guidance under the new conditions.”
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“My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road; in politics as well as in social reform I had been for "the best possible." But now I was pushed far toward the left on the subject of the war and I became gradually convinced that in order to make the position of the pacifist clear it was perhaps necessary that at least a small number of us should be forced into an unequivocal position.”
Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), Chapter 7 : Personal Reactions During War -
“Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), Chapter 7 : Personal Reactions During War”
My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road; in politics as well as in social reform I had been for "the best possible." But now I was pushed far toward the left on the subject of the war and I became gradually convinced that in order to make the position of the pacifist clear it was perhaps necessary that at least a small number of us should be forced into an uneq -
“Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), Chapter 7 : Personal Reactions During War”
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. Doubtless many times these new possibilities were declared by a man who, quite unconscious of courage, bore the "sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind." Did ever