Reformers Quotes

A reformer should be exempt from the suspicion of interest, and he must possess the confidence and esteem of those whom he proposes to reclaim.

Anyone who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems.

As long as the opposition believes the world will stand with Ukraine's democrat reformers, they will have the leverage and the courage to establish a legitimate republic under the leadership of Viktor Yushchenko.

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

A great social reformer.

Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!

I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes

It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

You cannot have a good character today and at the same time have a small mind and a little heart. You cannot have a good character today and be merely a petty reformer.

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.

What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what has been made, a denouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good?

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations.

A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.

Back in 2008, candidate Obama called a $10 trillion national debt 'unpatriotic' - serious talk from what looked to be a serious reformer. Yet by his own decisions, President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him, and more than all the troubled governments of Europe combined. One president, one term, $5 trillion in new debt.

History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.

The cure-alls of the present day are infinitely various and infinitely obliging. Applied psychology, autosuggestion, and royal roads to learning or to wealth are urged upon us by kindly, if not altogether disinterested, reformers. Simple and easy systems for the dissolution of discord and strife; simple and easy systems for the development of personality and power. Booklets of counsel on 'How to Get What We Want,' which is impossible; booklets on 'Visualization,' warranted to make us want what we get, which is ignoble.

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer; for it prevents those disorders which other remedies sometimes cure, but sometimes confirm.

The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher -- a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank.

Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.

We will meet our challenges head on and we will do it by rejecting the politics of mediocrity and corruption. You voted for change; I intend to deliver it. ... I will govern as a reformer.

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

As a reformer the liberal is dissatisfied with things as they are because they violate his exceptionally tender conscience.... Liberalism does not advocate change for its own sake, but for the sake of something better in the direction of what he regards as good, namely, the maximum of liberty consistent with a regard for all men and all interests -- the general happiness based on peace and justice.

Others - as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders - serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few - as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men - serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part.

As a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. And at that point what God provides, exactly as for a newborn infant, is the comfort, protection, and nurturing promise of a mother. "If God is our father, the church is our mother." The words are those of the Swiss Reformer John Calvin ... it is as impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable to be a Christian all by yourself as it is to be a newborn baby all by yourself.

I'm no reformer; for I see more lightThan darkness in the world; mine eyes are quickTo catch the first dim radiance of the dawn,And slow to note the cloud that threatens storm.

The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation is ever dangerous.

They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally allowable emotion, it may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman.

In every community there are little knots of fantastic extremists who loudly proclaim that they are striving for righteousness, and who, in reality, do their feeble best for unrighteousness. Just as the upright politician should hold in peculiar scorn the man who makes the name of politician a reproach and a shame, so the genuine reformer should realize that the cause he champions is especially jeopardized by the mock reformer who does what he can to make reform a laughingstock among decent men.

When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists. We are lucky, indeed, if the needless bureaucrats are mere easy-going loafers. They are more likely today to be energetic reformers busily discouraging and disrupting production.

The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.

The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased.

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.

Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice.

There was a whole group that really welcomed me: George Mitchell was one, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, the reformers were really delighted to see me. So if you were one of those squeaky clean, shiny bright, let's reform the world, you were very glad to see Barb Mikulski, and George Mitchell was in that category.

While we honour religion and believe it to be a powerful factor in elevating our race, we discriminate, as we hope our readers will also do, between it and dogmatism. Dogmatism has been the bane of civilization and a curse to mankind. It has degraded our sex, stifled intelligent inquiry, and persecuted every independent reformer and every noble cause.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

A Day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged 'need' or relieve some alleged distress.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

But the most annoying of all public reformers is the personal satirist. Though he may be considered by some few as a useful member of society, yet he is only ranked with the hangman, whom we tolerate because he executes the judgment we abhor to do ourselves, and avoid with a natural detestation of his office. The pen of the one and the cord of the other are inseparable in our minds.

Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.

Hindu philosophy was one of the greatest beneficiaries of the advent and the teachings of the Lord Buddha. I revere Buddha as a reformer of not only Hinduism but also the world, who has given all of us a new world view and vision which is critical for the survival of all of us and the entire world.

The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind.

Unable to maintain their government-granted monopoly, the powerful railroad interests turned to government to do the regulating and price-fixing which they were unable to do themselves. In fact, the pressure that induced Congress to enact the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 did not come from reformers bemoaning abuses by the powerful railroad interests; it came from the railroad interests themselves, asking Congress to shield them against the harsh winds of competition.

It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.