If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely ri...ght, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying princi...ple of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To grant woman an equality with man in the affairs of life is contrary to every tradition, every precedent, every inheritance, eve...ry instinct and every teaching. The acceptance of this idea is possible only to those of especially progressive tendencies and a strong sense of justice, and it is yet too soon to expect these from the majority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when the right of the individual is made sacred, when the image of God in human form, whether in marble or in clay, whether in... alabaster or in ebony, is consecrated and inviolable, when men have been taught to look beneath the rags and grime, the pomp and pageantry of mere circumstance and have regard unto the celestial kernel uncontaminated at the core,--when race, color, sex, condition, are realized to be the accidents, not the substance of life, and consequently as not obscuring or modifying the inalienable title to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,--then is mastered the science of politeness, the art of courteous contact, which is naught but the practical application of the principal [sic] of benevolence, the back bone and marrow of all religion; then woman's lesson is taught and woman's cause is won--not the white woman nor the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every man or woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Her wrongs are ... indissolubly linked with all undefended woe, all helpless suffering, and the plenitude of her "rights" will mea...n the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason and justice and love in the government of the nation. God hasten the day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... woman's cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will hav...e her "rights," and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and our fair land will have been taught the secret of universal courtesy which is after all nothing but the art, the science, and the religion of regarding one's neighbor as one's self, and to do for him as we would, were conditions swapped, that he do for us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there ha...s not been, in all history, another age ... when so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »