Happy Birthday Jane Addams!

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.

In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.

Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.

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

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy’s phrase “the snare of preparation,” which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

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

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.

America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.

It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless.

Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.

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.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

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.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.

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

True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.

Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.

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.