Jane Addams Quotes

I was always with the people.

If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.

You must do as your people do. If my people are poor, I must be poor. People ask me, 'Why don't you find a personal coach or a private car?' I can't. Then I won't be part of my people.

If citizenship means anything, it means sharing the pleasures and pains of American life.

When people fought for a democratic life, they were insisting that the common man had the capacity to engage in deliberation about how the community ought to run its life, not that you could let him squeak for what he wanted. And that ideal was that you could educate the common man to develop a certain amount of wisdom and that he could marshal the objectivity to deliberate and decide about what the public would require without always thinking that the political action was an opportunity to further his private interests…

What the best and wisest parent wants for his child must be what the community wants for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; it destroys our democracy.

We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community...Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own

All Soviet People were trying to do something to help the nation.

People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.

The collective comes before the individual.

All of us, as citizens, need to kind of get over our classisms and vote for the betterment of us all.

I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.

Life is a journey towards truth, we have something to learn from each other, and everybody ought to have a chance to make the journey. So for us, a community is just made up of anybody who accepts the rules of the game, everybody counts, everybody has a role to play, everybody deserves a chance and we all do better when we work together

There is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women in democratic societies cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves.

The welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.

The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men's hate but our love for our island and for each other.

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.

Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.

The whole idea of a public education was to train young people about how our system of government works, so they could be good citizens and be part of it. We're not doing that today.

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.

I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.

We must now, in the 21st century, protect democracy, one which rests on fundamental rights for all, regardless of skin color, gender, race or religion. Nothing less than that is at stake.

The oneness of community for instance is at the heart of our culture.

Love of the republic in a democracy, is a love of the democracy; love of the democracy is that of equality. Love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality.

Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.