National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.
Interpretation
Our values and beliefs shape national events while those events, in turn, shape our values.
Jane Addams highlights the reciprocal relationship between national events and societal ideals. This quote emphasizes that the collective values held by society can influence the course of significant national happenings, while those events can also redefine and evolve those very ideals, creating a continuous feedback loop in the social fabric.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of civic engagement, one might use this quote to illustrate how community values impact local governance.
I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.
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.
Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.
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.
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.
If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.
As far as social-economic theory is concerned, I am still a Marxist
As frightening as this may sound, what you see in the books is the way I see the world. And so far I haven't seen anything, either in Florida or elsewhere, to dissuade me from it.
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
When we understand our relationship to God, we also understand our relationship to one another.
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing _x000D_ That is more than your own. _x000D_ Let it brush your cheeks _x000D_ As it divides and rejoins behind you. _x000D_ _x000D_ The trees you planted in childhood have grown _x000D_ Too heavy. You cannot bring them along. _x000D_ Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
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