23 quotes
Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
Life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole ...
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.
The MacMillan Dictionary of Quotations (1989)
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.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
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.
Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922)
Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment ...
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty ...
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Democracy and Social Ethics (1902)
A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
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!
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life’s very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should be effective against them.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
To “protect the weak” has always been the excuse of the ruler and tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of “the white man.”
… 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.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
The blessings we associate with a life of refinement and culture can be made universal. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father’s had become, during his earlier years of a miller’s life.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)