Hull House Quotes

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.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.

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.

I am not one of those who believe - broadly speaking - that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand.

Must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

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!

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep.

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.

It was also my experience at Hull-House that aroused my interest in industrial diseases.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

If in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave.

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.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

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.

Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.

Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.

An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply low rental.

In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

The blessing which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent.

Of all aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.

Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, "How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?" It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer--a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.

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.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.