“Reform is a word you always ought to watch out for. Like, when Mao started the Cultural Revolution it wasn't called a reform. Reform is a change that you're supposed to like. So as soon as you hear the word reform you can reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it. […] Subsidy is another interesting word, kind of like reform. It's a subsidy if public funds are used for public purposes. That's called a subsidy. It's not called a subsidy when it goes to private wealth. That's reform or something.”
Talk titled "Free Market Fantasies" at Harvard University, April 13, 1996 https://chomsky.info/19960413/.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999
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Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist 1928Related quotes

21 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: We scarce ever had a prince, who by fraud, or violence, had not made some infringement on the constitution. We scarce ever had a parliament which knew, when it attempted to set limits to the royal authority, how to set limits to its own. Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils. Our boasted liberty sometimes trodden down, sometimes giddily set up, and ever precariously fluctuating and unsettled; it has only been kept alive by the blasts of continual feuds, wars, and conspiracies.

“The Reform party is much closer to what you would call conservative Republican.”
1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Source: Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990), p. 314

As quoted in Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic (1987) by Timothy Travers, p. 162.