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Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Settlement House 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.
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The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels, but in that case there must be something vital to rebel against and if the elderly stiffly refuse to put up a vigorous front of their own, it leaves the entire situation in a mist.
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Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
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The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
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If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.
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Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.
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Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.
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Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.
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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!
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The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.
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… 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.
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Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.
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Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.
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Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
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The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.