Dorothea Dix Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

Be of good cheer, for sadness cannot heal the national wounds.

Dorothea Dix
In proportion as my own discomfort has increased, my conviction of necessity to search into the wants of the friendless and afflicted has deepened. If I am cold, they too are cold; if I am weary, they are distressed; if I am alone, they are abandoned.

Dorothea Dix
A man usually values that most for which he has labored; he uses that most frugally which he has toiled hour by hour and day by day to acquire.

Dorothea Dix
Of all the calamities to which humanity is subject, none is so dreadful as insanity.... All experience shows that insanity seasonably treated is as certainly curable as a cold or a fever.

Dorothea Dix
Society, during the last hundred years, has been alternately perplexed and encouraged, respecting the two great questions -how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of, in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand, and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

Dorothea Dix
I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come to place before the Legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. I come as the advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane men and women; of beings sunk to a condition from which the unconcerned world would start with real horror.

Dorothea Dix
Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.

Dorothea Dix