Jane Addams Quotes

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

In the housing projects, people talked of ways to reduce crime, relieve overcrowding, and they were good ideas that we plan to study, and possibly implement.

The way everyone in London is right up against each other makes it very real to you growing up, the fact that people have different lives to you. And that causes problems; of course it does.

More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities.

I'm from the inner city of Buffalo.

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

We're also going to fix our inner cities. Forty-five percent of African-American children are - under the age six - are living in poverty.

There are places that are thriving in America that don't need very much help, and then there are places where people feel so discouraged and so left behind, like nobody cares about them. And I want to try to help there.

In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms.

A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations.

I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

The volunteering spirit of Londoners is part of what makes this the best big city on earth.

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?

As far as inner cities, I was very strong on the inner cities during the campaign, I think it's probably got me much higher percentage of the African American vote than lot of people thought I was going to get. We did much higher than people thought I was going to get. I was honored by that.

I hope we get a real diversity in perspectives from the good, the bad and the ugly. I love living in London so I hope there are submissions that celebrate the City while also showing that there are many challenges we need to face together.

There is no more compassionate and effective way to help poor people in New York City than to give to Robin Hood.

Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Hillary Clinton's been talking about the inner cities for 25 years. Nothing's going to ever happen.

We are going to be working very hard on the inner cities having to do with education, having to do with crime. We're going to try and fix as quickly as possible.