Jane Addams Quotes on Virtue
Jane Addams was an American social philosopher, reformer, and pacifist and the most influential American woman public intellectual of her generation. This page collects quotes attributed to Jane Addams on the topic of virtue, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Jane Addams:
“Democracy is not a form of government, but a way of life.”
-
Attributed to Jane Addams:
“Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.”
-
Attributed to Jane Addams:
“Old morality is too narrow to give us guidance under the new conditions.”
-
“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 every one so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional highway?”
Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), Chapter 7 : Personal Reactions During War -
“In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.”
As quoted in The MacMillan Dictionary of Quotations (1989) by John Daintith, Hazel Egerton, Rosalind Ferguson, Anne Stibbs and Edmund Wright, p. 374.