16 quotes
Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
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)
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)
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)
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)
… 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)
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)
If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong; but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him.
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)