Quotes about reform
page 5

“Too often the reformer has been one who caused the rich to band themselves against the poor.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 14.

“[ John Rawls's] Theory of Justice begins with this assertion: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust …. Truth and justice are uncompromising” (p. 3). How, one might ask. do we know that justice has this preeminence? Rawls’s second basic claim is that we have a particular kind of access to this preeminence: we have an “intuitive conviction of the primacy of justice” (p. 4) over all other considerations including welfare, efficiency, democratic choice, transparency, dignity, international competitiveness, or freedom, and, of course, over any rooted moral, philosophical, or religious conceptions. There is no account of where these intuitions came from, whether they might be in any way historically or sociologically variable, or what role they play in society.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 70-71.

Truth, Justice, Law, Way

“The recently passed law to "end welfare as we know it" came about because a lethargic public has been aroused at last, not by the failure of the welfare system but by its success. The public indignation, however, would have been of no effect had we not elected a Republican Congress. No Democratic Congress would ever have passed such a law. Just as welfare reform may help end the poverty industry, the California Civil Rights Initiative on the November ballot may lead to the demise of another 1960s product, the racism and sexism industry. The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based upon race, sex, color, religion or ethnic origin. The act was based on the premise that the only race to which a person must belong is the human race. With respect to God-given natural rights, "all men are created equal."”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Men, God, Religion, Law

“There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 2 “Bubblings”, Section 5 (p. 75)

Sense

“The Western societies have had hundreds of years of reformation behind them. Islam has never had its reformation, and that is part of the problem. If you look back to the 16th and 17th centuries when men were killing one another in the name of religion throughout Europe, that's where we're at more or less, historically speaking, in terms of the level of debate and discourse. The Quran is considered an untouchable text, not a historical document. … This is the literal word of God, and it is very dangerous to play with that in the Middle East today.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

Men, God, Religion, Problem

“The revolution has failed. Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 120

Way

“There is no hidden agenda. If anybody wonders about — what’s this with all these reforms — you can hear us clearly. Our goal is total animal liberation.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

“Animal Rights 2002” convention, 2002 June 30

Animals

“I’m committed to defending DAPA and DACA. I’m committed to going even further to get more people deferred action, to go as far as I can under the law. And I am committed to introducing comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship in the first 100 days of my presidency.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

People, Law

“The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.”

Abigail Scott Duniway (1834–1915) American suffragist, writer, journalist, pioneer

Abigail Scott Duniway, quoted in Westward the Women https://books.google.com/books?id=Xy50CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT127&lpg=PT127&dq=%22+young+women+of+today,+free+to+study,+to+speak,+to+write%22&source=bl&ots=9gDARyV3TU&sig=qp7E9Zg0u1yJCbJVQ-pqBeu49JE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_zKKCp5zZAhUEyGMKHTdVCcQQ6AEINTAC#v=onepage&q=%22%20young%20women%20of%20today%2C%20free%20to%20study%2C%20to%20speak%2C%20to%20write%22&f=false and by the Hatfield School of Govennment's Center for Women's Leadership https://www.pdx.edu/womens-leadership/abigail-scott-duniway-speaker-series

Women, Truth, Study, Freedom

“The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads.”

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) Italian patriot, politician and philosopher

Watchword for the Roman Republic (1849)

“Everybody has the right to speak up in a democracy. We would be in trouble as a society if there wasn't a constant pressure to make reforms and to be just. Sometimes as prime minister, when i was caught up in a really loud demonstration, I used to say to myself that I deserved it because of all the demonstrations I myself had organized as a student against Duplessis.”

Jean Chrétien (1934) 20th Prime Minister of Canada

Source: My Years As Prime Minister (2007), Chapter Seven, Security Details, p. 183

Democracy

“Every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation, while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for reform does not contain its own force independent from revolution. During every historic period, work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given to it by the impetus of the last revolution and continues as long as the impulsion from the last revolution continues to make itself felt. Or, to put it more concretely, in each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. Here is the kernel of the problem.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch. 8

Life, History, Problem

“It has been well said … that there are steps on the way to the summit of Dietetic Reform, and, if only one step be taken, yet that single step will be not without importance and without influence in the world. The step, which leaves for ever behind it the barbarism of slaughtering our fellow-beings, the Mammals and Birds, is, it is superfluous to add, the most important and most influential of all.”

Howard Williams (humanitarian) (1837–1931) English humanitarian

The Ethics of Diet, Preface http://www.ivu.org/history/williams/preface.html from the 1st edition, 1883.

World, Way, Bird

“We must not always attach too much importance to violent attacks on the bourgeoisie; they may be motivated by the desire to reform and to perfect capitalism.”

Georges Sorel book Reflections on Violence

Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 125

Motivation, Perfection

“I am angry at the custom of forbidding children to call their father by the name of father, and to enjoin them another, as more full of respect and reverence, as if nature had not sufficiently provided for our authority. We call Almighty God Father, and disdain to have our children call us so. I have reformed this error in my family.—[As did Henry IV. of France]—And 'tis also folly and injustice to deprive children, when grown up, of familiarity with their father, and to carry a scornful and austere countenance toward them, thinking by that to keep them in awe and obedience; for it is a very idle farce that, instead of producing the effect designed, renders fathers distasteful, and, which is worse, ridiculous to their own children.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 8. On the affections of fathers to their children
Essais (1595), Book II

God, Children, Family, Error

“We live in a quickly changing world, therefore we must foretell developments, and reforms should respond to these changes.”

Tigran Sargsyan (1960) Economist, politician

RA Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan’s Remarks at the Annual Meeting of RA National Academy of Sciences (22 April 2009) http://www.gov.am/en/speeches/1/item/2853/ 2009

World, Change

“[I was] a youth in his twenty third year, young of his age, who had seen little or nothing of the world, who resigned himself to politics, but whose desire had been for the ministry of God. The remains of this desire operated unfortunately. They made me tend to glorify in an extravagant manner and degree not only the religious character of the State, which in reality stood low, but also the religious mission of the Conservative party. There was, to my eyes, a certain element of AntiChrist in the Reform Act and that Act was cordially hated. … It was only under the (second) Government of Sir Robert Peel that I learned how impotent [and] barren was the conservative office for the Church.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

'My Earlier Political Opinions. (II) The Extrication' (16 July 1892), quoted in John Brooke and Mary Sorensen (eds.), The Prime Minister's Papers: W. E. Gladstone. I: Autobiographica (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1971), p. 40.
1890s

God, Hate, Youth, Age

“[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history’s dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson’s estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt’s anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Ibid. (p. 8).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

War, School, Law, History

“You are suffering from the unrestricted imports of cheaper goods. You are suffering also from the unrestricted immigration of the people who make these goods. (Loud and prolonged cheers.)…The evils of immigration have increased during recent years. And behind those people who have already reached these shores, remember there are millions of the same kind who, under easily conceivable circumstances, might follow in their track, and might invade this country in a way and to an extent of which few people have at present any conception. The same causes that brought 10,000 and 20,000, and tens of thousands, may bring hundreds of thousands, or even millions. (Hear, hear.) If that would be an evil, surely he is a statesman who would deal with it in the beginning. (Hear, hear.)…When it began we were told it was so small that it would not matter to us. Now it has been growing with great rapidity, it has already affected a whole district, it is spreading into other parts of the country…Will you take it in time (hear, hear), or will you wait, hoping for something to turn up which will preserve you from what you all see to be the natural consequences of such an invasion? …it is a fact that when these aliens come here they are answerable for a larger amount of crime and disease and hopeless poverty than are proportionate to their numbers. (Cheers.) They come here—I do not blame them, I am speaking of the results—they come here and change the whole character of a district. (Cheers.) The speech, the nationality of whole streets has been altered; and British workmen have been driven by the fierce competition of famished men from trades which they previously followed. (Cheers.)…But the party of free importers is against any reform. How could they be otherwise?…they are perfectly consistent. If sweated goods are to be allowed in this country without restriction, why not the people who make them? Where is the difference? There is no difference either in the principle or in the results. It all comes to the same thing—less labour for the British working man.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Cheers.
Speech in Limehouse in the East End of London (15 December 1904), quoted in ‘Mr. Chamberlain In The East-End.’, The Times (16 December 1904), p. 8.
1900s

Men, People, Disease, Hope

“Present party designations have become empty of all contents…Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Letter to Sir Francis Webster, president of the Montrose Burghs Liberal Association, quoted in 'Lord Morley On Modern Politics', The Times (11 May 1923), p. 12.

Money, Problem, Learning

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

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to James Ogilvie (4 August 1811)
1810s

Religion, Error

“It was not his fight. Not personally his fight. No more his fight than any one of them. But he had made it his. Because of Stone, because of Rand and Harriet, because of priest who’d hounded him across half the continent, he had tried to make a fight of it. And perhaps, as well, because of something undefinable, unknown to himself, unsuspected in himself—some crazy idealism, some deep-rooted sense of justice, some basic aversion to bullies and bigots and reformers.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (p. 245)

Justice, Sense, Fight, Personality

“Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people — to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the "Great Society" have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

People, Truth, Time

“There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.”

I. F. Stone (1907–1989) American investigative journalist and author

I.F. Stone's Weekly (1954-03-15)

War, Peace, Way, Idea

“The Objective of Ahlehadeeth movement is to propagate and inculcate pure Tawheed in all spheres of life by following exact instructions of Kitab and Sunnah to gain satisfaction of Allah. The social and political objectives of Ahl-i-Hadeeth Movement is to bring about all round reforms of the society through ensuring the rectification of Aqeedah and 'Amal”

Muhammad Asadullah Al-Ghalib (1948) Bangladeshi academic

i.e. faith & deeds (English Translation). http://www.ahlehadeethbd.org/porichitienglish.html Organizational leaflet

Life, Faith

“My priorities are to deport violent criminals, terrorists, and anyone who threatens our safety. So I do not have the same policy as the current administration does. I think it’s important that we move to our comprehensive immigration reform, but at the same time, stop the raids, stop the round-ups, stop the deporting of people who are living here doing their lives, doing their jobs, and that’s my priority.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

People, Thinking, Time

“…the following passage from Major Cartwright's Memorandum Book: “On Sunday the 10th of April, 1814, Earl Stanhope informed me that in conversation with Mr. Fox and a third person, Mr. Fox said ‘Parliamentary reform was a fit thing to be made use of in argument in the House of Commons, but not to be carried into execution.’” Lord Stanhope also mentioned the same fact to Major Cartwright's friend, Mr. Holt White, and in the same words.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

F. D. Cartwright (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright. Volume I (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), pp. 132-133, n.
Attributed

Books, Housing, Personality

“The problem of anachronism is a serious one when it comes to evaluating materials in the Bible because there is a widespread assumption in the conservative Christian community, ever since the Reformation, that God's Word requires only a good, clear mind, an open heart, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to be understood.”

Ben Witherington III (1951) American religion academic

Prolegomenon
New Testament History : A Narrative Account (2001)

God, Communication, Problem, Heart

“Liberalism supplies at once the higher impulse and the practicable path; it appeals to persons by sentiments of generosity and humanity; it proceeds by courses of moderation. By gradual steps, by steady effort from day to day, from year to year, Liberalism enlists hundreds of thousands upon the side of progress and popular democratic reform whom militant Socialism would drive into violent Tory reaction … The cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 152-153
Early career years (1898–1929)

Effort, Personality

“The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Two, pp.. 79

“Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

South Wales Echo (November 1, 1975).

School, Training

“The economic crisis was a reflection of narcissism and very primitive defense mechanisms (such as a complete denial of economic reality) built into the financial system. The best and brightest MBA students have been going into investment banking; many of them used their brains essentially to play casino games, and not to add much value to society.
Now, we’ve seen the result. Look at the least-admired professions in most countries over the years: telemarketers and used-car salesmen. Today, you have bankers and CEOs achieving the same low rating. Companies like Citibank — which was the brainchild of one of the most visibly narcissistic executives in the world, Sanford Weill — have essentially collapsed. They have grown too complex for the people who work there to understand. I strongly question what the different parts of Citibank have in common. No matter what kinds of regulatory reforms are initiated, more companies will collapse this way, because narcissism breeds this kind of unmanageable grandiosity.”

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries (1942) Dutch academic

Manfred Kets de Vries in: " The Thought Leader Interview: Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10209?gko=cbe31," in: Strategy + business. May 10, 2010. Originally published by Booz & Company.

People, World, Cars, Way

“We shall almost be hooted down in the House, I expect, for the Tories are for war, partly because the Government has been supposed to be for peace. And if war begins, then nine-tenths of the men on our side will back the Government and shout even more vociferously than the Tories. Losing a Reform Bill and gaining a war. I don't see how we could be worse placed. Though the end may show that we are now right, yet the end is not yet, and in the meantime we shall have much to suffer and much to despond about. How men can prefer the certain and enormous evils of a war, to the dim and vague prospect of remote injury from Russian aggrandisement, is beyond my understanding. The nation seems little wiser than in 1793 and we may soon be as unpopular as Fox was, and yet be as much right as he was. I feel rather sick of public life, and indeed of the follies of my country.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Cobden (24 December 1853), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 229-230.
1850s

Life, Men, War, Peace

“I started hearing from families who had missing members, many of them young kids on our campus, and they all would describe the same sorts of things. A sudden change of personality, a new way of talking…and then they would disappear. And bingo, it was the same sort of thing as with the Korean War prisoners, the same sort of thought-reform and social controls. You find it again and again, any time people feel vulnerable. There are always sharpies around who want to hornswoggle people.”

Margaret Singer (1921–2003) clinical psychology

Margaret Singer - expert on brainwashing http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/25/BAGAG3A5A11.DTL, San Francisco Chronicle, November 25, 2003 2003

War, People, Family, Way

“At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night I, Line 417.

Fools

“we must make it clear that the reform of Europe [the EU] can only start with stopping the migrants, putting an end to immigration, and everyone using their national competence to protect their borders. After that, as part of a joint programme the migrants who have already arrived in Europe illegally must be transported back to some place outside the territory of the European Union.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Parting

“I am for "peace, retrenchment, and reform" — the watchword of the great Liberal party 30 years ago. Whosoever may abandon the cause I shall never pronounce another Shibboleth, but as long as the old flag floats in the air I shall be found a steadfast soldier in the foremost ranks”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech (28 April 1859); this phrase was first used by William IV in his speech from the Throne for the Whig government of Earl Grey (17 November 1830), quoted in The Times (29 April 1859), p. 6.
1850s

Peace

“Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear the most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. xix

People, Fear, Feeling, Change

“The Czech people has never had any sensitivity to current affairs. They were always prepared to defend the stale and unviable. In the Middle Ages, they wanted to reform the moribund Western Gothic with the Hussite movement. In the Great War, they lapsed into a primitive Slavophile doctrine and then they began to throw in their lot with morally putrid Western democracy.”

Emanuel Moravec (1893–1945) Czech military officer, writer, and politician

Moravec, Emanuel (1941). "Das Ende der Benesch-Republik. Die tschechoslowakische Krise 1938".

War, People, Age, Democracy

“No words used in the Gospels can legitimately be twisted to mean unending punishment, and indeed, such an expression is self-contradictory. The main motive of punishment surely is to reform the sufferer; in school, to make a better scholar; in the State, to make a better citizen. If the punishment goes on forever when does the sufferer benefit by the punishment or use the lesson he has learned so painfully? If Hell were endless it would be valueless.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.286

School, Motivation, Hell, Suffering

“Grey was an ambitious man who always wished to lead, but his overt ambition during his youth made him unpopular. He lacked the warmth of personality that made Fox revered by his followers. Grey was respected but rarely loved. His achievements were few, but they were significant. He helped to keep liberal principles alive during the years of conflict with revolutionary France, and in 1832 he safeguarded the continuity of the British constitution into an era of increasingly rapid social and political change. In character he was a man of contradictions, headstrong but easily discouraged by failure, imperious but indecisive, cautious and introspective. He was at his best when in office, for he sought fame and reputation: in opposition he often became despondent. He was a man of principle and integrity, though not always successful in execution. His bearing and attitudes were aristocratic, and his instincts were fundamentally conservative. He was a whig of the eighteenth-century school, most at home among his deferential clients, tenants, and labourers at Howick, and he never came to terms with the new industrial society which was coming into being during his later years. It is greatly to his credit that his Reform Act, whatever its conservative purpose, smoothed the path for that new society to establish its dominance without destroying the old.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

E. A. Smith, ‘ Grey, Charles, second Earl Grey (1764–1845) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11526’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 8 Sept 2012. About

Love, Youth, School, Home

“As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it -- along the lines that President Bush proposed.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

February 2008 http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB120451614688707083.html 2000s, 2008

Parting

“Calendar Reform is the final act of history, and the first step toward Earth Regeneration in the cradle of galactic culture.”

José Argüelles (1939–2011) American author and artist

Quoted on Calendar Reform and the Future of Civilization, Preparatory Reflections for the World Summit on Peace and Time University for Peace http://www.lawoftime.org/timeshipearth/articlesbyvv/calendarreform.html%20Full%20Text, Costa Rica, June 22, 1999 - June 27, 1999).

History

““Reformation theology” … pretends to prefer to Pharasaic ostentation a modest invisibility, which in practice means conformity to the world. When that happens, the hallmark of the Church becomes justitia civilis instead of extraordinary visibility. The very failure of the light to shine becomes the touchstone of our Christianity.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Discipleship (1937), The Visible Community, p. 118.

World, Failure, Light

“More and more parents are coming to realize their children are suffering at the hands of a system built to strangle any reform, any innovation, or any change.... This realization is becoming more evident as the momentum builds for an education revolution.”

Betsy DeVos (1958) 11th United States Secretary of Education

From remarks at the American Federation of Children made in May of 2016, as quoted in "Betsy DeVos, the (Relatively Mainstream) Reformer," by Michael McShane, EducationNext (2017), Volume 17 (No. 3). http://educationnext.org/betsy-devos-relatively-mainstream-reformer-education-secretary/#.WJo0Cp2xCzE.twitter

Children, Education, Parent, Suffering

“He adapted the words to the capacity of the Germans, often at the expense of accuracy. He cared more for the substance than the form. He turned the Hebrew shekel into a Silberling, He used popular alliterative phrases as Geld und Gut, Land und Leute, Rath und That, Stecken und Stab, Dornen und Disteln, matt und müde, gäng und gäbe. He avoided foreign terms which rushed in like a flood with the revival of learning, especially in proper names (as Melanchthon for Schwarzerd, Aurifaber for Goldschmid, Oecolampadius for Hausschein, Camerarius for Kammermeister). He enriched the vocabulary with such beautiful words as holdselig, Gottseligkeit.
Erasmus Alber, a contemporary of Luther, called him the German Cicero, who not only reformed religion, but also the German language.
Luther's version is an idiomatic reproduction of the Bible in the very spirit of the Bible. It brings out the whole wealth, force, and beauty of the German language. It is the first German classic, as King James's version is the first English classic. It anticipated the golden age of German literature as represented by Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,—all of them Protestants, and more or less indebted to the Luther-Bible for their style. The best authority in Teutonic philology pronounces his language to be the foundation of the new High German dialect on account of its purity and influence, and the Protestant dialect on account of its freedom which conquered even Roman Catholic authors.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Notable examples of Luther's renderings of Hebrew and Greek words

Age, Religion, Beauty, Literature

“Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form, and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Goethe; or, the Writer” p. 271
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Men, Strong, Dance

“We have no proverbial tea to dump, should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports? Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that. But it might.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

1990s, Letter to the Union-Sun & Journal (1992)

War, Hope, Tea

“I further recommend that provision be made for the appointment of a commission, to consist of two or three members of the Federal judiciary and as many members of the bar, to examine the present criminal code of procedure and recommend to the Congress measures which may reform and expedite court procedure in the administration and enforcement of our criminal laws.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Law

“Solon was a sort of Athenian Franklin D. Roosevelt… He was an aristocratic reformer who understood instinctively that the aristocracy's monopoly on power had to be loosened and some power given to the lesser orders if social peace was to be shored up.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

Peace

“While bringing about reforms and improving institutions, we have to be cautious that while shaking the tree to remove the bad fruit, we do not bring down the tree itself.”

Pratibha Patil (1934) 12th President of India

Quoted in BBC News, "India President Pratibha Patil cautions on reform" http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-16724191, January 25, 2012.

Tree

“Last year, when we had the Liberal government putting the protection of sexual orientation in our Human Rights Act, the Reform Party was opposed to that, but made a terrible mess of the debate. In fact, discredited itself on that issue, not just with the conventional liberal media, but even with many social conservatives by the manner in which it mishandled that.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

“Some within the Nazi hierarchy… called for 'blue- and white-collar workers to be put on equal footing’ to give them a preliminary taste of the harmonious future to come, which would be achieve through a ‘generous reform of the social-welfare state in the interest of working people.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 57

People, Future

“Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education and education. We are 35th in the world league of education standards – 35th. At every level, radical improvement and reform.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"We are back as the people's party, says Blair", The Times, 2 October 1996.
1990s

World, Education

“Copernicus published his manuscript in 1543 just in time for the council of Trent. So you're a church father and what this new system of Copernicus is saying is this: The Earth moves, although the Bible says it doesn't. It's no longer at the center of God's universe, although the Bible says it is. It's a planet, so heaven and Earth are no longer separate. And Aristotle was wrong, although church authority depends on him being right. You're a church father and you pick up this subversive, heretical, revolutionary piece of lunacy and you start foaming at the mouth, right? Wrong. When the council finally got around to reading Copernicus they were delighted. His new system had made calendar reform more precise. And the business of it turning every basic belief about the universe on its head? A mere fairytale since from the church's viewpoint he was talking nonsense. Astronomy drew lines and circles in the sky but they weren't really there, they're a mathematical convenience for measuring or teaching astronomy. While the Copernicus system might well have been brilliant mathematics, no one thought for a minute that he was actually suggesting the earth was whizzing around the sun. That kind of talk would blow holes in everything.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

The Day the Universe Changed (1985)

God, Mathematics, Business, Fairytale

“I do have the toughest, most comprehensive plan to go after Wall Street. And not just the big banks, all the other financial interests that pose a threat to our economy. And I have said no bank is too big to fail and no executive is too powerful to jail, and I will use the powers that have now been passed by the Congress, by President Obama, who, incidentally, took a lot of money from Wall Street, which didn’t stop him from signing into law the toughest regulations on the financial industry since the Great Depression. There are a lot of different powerful interests in Washington. I’ve taken them on. I took on the drug companies. I took on the insurance companies. Before there was something called Obamacare, there was something called Hillarycare, and I worked really hard to get comprehensive health care reform.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

Money, Law

“The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate [a free inquiry]? The blackest billingsgate, most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

XXXI, p. 517. Also quoted in The Political Writings of John Adams (2001) edited by George W. Carey, p. 440 http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0895262924&id=zwKs6Wf2NUEC&pg=PA440&lpg=PA440&ots=qW8I2vCTNZ&dq=%22solemn+truth+in+collision+with+a+dogma+of+a+sect%22&sig=BrWgHvNRAAWcN0rXxdBa7zjeEcc 1810s, Letters to John Taylor (1814)

Truth, Knowledge, Learning, Reading

“We have to be on our guard when the whig historian tells us… that the Reformation is justified because it ultimately led to liberty… for it is possible to argue against the whig historian that the ultimate issue which he applauds only came in the long run from the fact that, in its immediate results, The Reformation was disastrous to liberty.”

Herbert Butterfield book The Whig Interpretation of History

Source: The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)

“I am convinced that the enactment this year of tax reduction and tax reform overshadows all other domestic problems in this Congress. For we cannot for long lead the cause of peace and freedom, if we ever cease to set the pace here at home. For we cannot for long lead the cause of peace and freedom, if we ever cease to set the pace here at home.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Third State of the Union Address

Peace, Home, Problem, Freedom

“His [Turgot's] first important literary and scholastic effort was a treatise On the Existence of God. Few fragments of it remain, but we are helped to understand him when we learn that he asserted, and to the end of his life maintained, his belief in an Almighty Creator and Upholder of the Universe. It did, indeed, at a later period suit the purposes of his enemies, exasperated by his tolerant spirit and his reforming plans, to proclaim him an atheist; but that sort of charge has been the commonest of missiles against troublesome thinkers in all times.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

only three fragments of this treatise remain, per Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (baron de l'Aulne), The life and writings of Turgot:Comptroller-General of France, 1774-6 http://books.google.com/books?id=DNHrAAAAMAAJ& W. Walker Stephens, editor, Longman, Green and Co. 1895 p. 7 Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 167-168

Life, God, Understanding, Effort

“It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform.”

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Noble Lord

Source: A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), p. 20

Time

“The Christian community … is faced ever more clearly with the dilemma now confronting the whole continent: to be for or against the system, or more subtly, to be for reform or revolution.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation (1971), p. 138

Communication

“Some employees in slaughterhouses, she notes, rapidly develop a protective hardness and start killing animals in a purely mechanical way: “The person doing the killing approaches his job as if he was stapling boxes moving along a conveyor belt. He has no emotions about his act.” Others, she reveals, “start to enjoy killing and… torment the animals on purpose.” Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple’s mind to a parallel: “I find a very high correlation,” she said, “between the way animals are treated and the handicapped…. Georgia is a snake pit—they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals…. Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped.” All this makes Temple passionately angry, and passionately concerned for humane reform: she wants to reform the treatment of the handicapped, especially the autistic, as she wants to reform the treatment of cattle in the meat industry.”

Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) British neurologist and writer

An Anthropologist On Mars, The New Yorker, 27 December 1993

People, Way, Passion, Animals

“But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)

Men

“In the autumn of 1916 when I devoted all my energies to drawing up systematic guidelines for the liberation of working women in all areas, I found a valuable support in the first President of the Soviets, Sverdlov, now dead. Thus the first Congress of Women Workers and Women Peasants could be called as early as November of 1918; some 1147 delegates were present. Thus the foundation was laid for methodical work in the whole country for the liberation of the women of the working and the peasant classes. A flood of new work was waiting for me. The question now was one of drawing women into the people's kitchens and of educating them to devote their energies to children's homes and day-care centers, the school system, household reforms, and still many other pressing matters. The main thrust of all this activity was to implement, in fact, equal rights for women as a labor unit in the national economy and as a citizen in the political sphere and, of course, with the special proviso: maternity was to be appraised as a social function and therefore protected and provided for by the State.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Women, Children, People, Education

“We will not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will also take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that we need.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Law, Way, Idea, Change

“We believe there should be reforms in the EEC which would benefit all the members. If these were not achieved, our policy is to preserve the ultimate option of withdrawing Britain. That option would not, this time, need a referendum, as it did before.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Source: On Labour policy regarding the EEC (8 January 1986)

Time

“Men have been Laughed out of Faults which a Sermon could not reform.”

Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) (1694–1746) Irish philosopher

The Dublin Weekly Journal, No. 12 (June 19, 1725)

Men

“Empowering those moderate and reforming voices who speak for the vast majority of Muslims that want to reclaim their religion. And addressing the identity crisis that some young people feel by bringing our communities together and extending opportunity to all.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on extremism (20 July 2015)

People, Religion, Feeling, Communication

“A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic, reformism is basically optimistic.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

Self-quoted in The Whitlam Government 1972–1975 by Gough Whitlam

Hope

“The world will not reform for all your meddling.”

Molière The Misanthrope

Et c’est une folie, à nulle autre, seconde,
De vouloir se mêler de corriger le monde.
As published in Le Misanthrope, Molière, tr. Curtis Hidden Page, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (1913), p. 12
Variant translation: Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.
As contained in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press (1993), p.772 : ISBN 0231071949
Act I, sc. 1, lines 155-156 (Philinte)
Le Misanthrope (1666)

World

“Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 5, p. 71

Business

“And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Beauty, Soul

“Realism isn't pessimism. And though the anti-reform interests have won an unconscionable number of battles over the last decade, the war is by no means over.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)

War

“Public administration as an American profession originated in the early twentieth century with urban reformers advocating the application of scientific and business practices to rehabilitate corrupt city governments. That approach transformed governance in the United States but also guaranteed recurrent debate over the proper role of public administrators, who must balance the often contradictory demands of efficiency and politically defined notions of the public good. Currently the business approach holds sway. Legitimated by Al Gore's National Performance Review, the New Public Management movement promotes entrepreneurs over civil servants, performance over process, decentralization over centralization, and flexibility over rules. John Rohr demurs, arguing that the movement goes too far in downplaying the distinctively American challenges arising from the separated powers principle. Consequently, the NPM alienates public management from its natural home -- a nation-state established within a constitutional order.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Abstract
Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002

Home, Business, Nature

“Universality has been severely reduced: it is virtually dead as a concept in most areas of public policy…These achievements are due in part to the Reform Party…”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Speech to the Colin Brown Memorial Dinner, National Citizens Coalition, 1994.
1990s

Universe, Parting, Dead

“I believe most Muslims are secular. I don't believe that most Muslims subscribe to devout fundamentalist Islam by any stretch of the imagination. And we need the secular Muslims to win the battle for the reformation of Islam.”

Pamela Geller (1958) blogger, author, political activist, and commentator

Pamela Geller: "This Is a Clash of Civilizations" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/religion/man-behind-mosque/pamela-geller-this-is-a-clash-of-civilizations/, PBS (27 September 2011)

Imagination

“When it comes to abortion, euthanasia, and other sanctity of life issues, we should not suppose that our choice is between reforming the law and working to change the culture. We must do both. The work of legal reform is necessary, though not sufficient, ingredient in the larger project of cultural transformation. Yes, we must change people's hearts. But no, we must not wait for changes of heart before changing the laws. We must do both at the same time, recognizing that just laws help to form good hearts, and unjust laws impede every other effort in the cause of the Gospel of Life.”

Francis George (1937–2015) Catholic cardinal

God in Action: How Faith in God Can Address the Challenges of the World (2011) Ch. 3 "Personal Freedom in American Culture: We Can't Act If God Can't," pp. 72-73.

Life, People, Law, Effort

“As an animal, Matilda was all right, full of life, vigour, and activity; as an intelligent being, she was barbarously ignorant, indocile, careless, and irrational; and consequently, very distressing to one who had the task of cultivating her understanding, reforming her manners, and aiding her to acquire those ornamental attainments which, unlike her sister, she despised as much as the rest…”

Anne Brontë book Agnes Grey

Source: Agnes Grey (1847), Ch. VII : Horton Lodge

Life, Intelligence, Understanding, Sister

“We can't even reform the way we make pennies and nickels. This week we learn that making a penny now costs 2 cents and making a nickel costs 9 cents, which makes no sense.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

"Apple should take over government" http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=UiZVrzz_zfE&NR=1 May 14, 2010. Real Time with Bill Maher

Way, Sense, Learning

“Ukraine is facing a serious threat of isolation as some local political forces want to put an end to democracy and democratic reforms in the country”

Viktor Yushchenko (1954) Ukrainian politician who was President of Ukraine

Regnum, July 25, 2006

Democracy, Country

“I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard all facts.”

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

Source: My Life and Work (1922), p. 2

World, Thinking, Tear

“I very well recollect the reformation which took place in the country among the various denominations of Christians-the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and others-when Joseph was a boy. Joseph's mother, one of his brothers, and one, if not two, of his sisters were members of the Presbyterian Church, and on this account the Presbyterians hung to the family with great tenacity. And in the midst of these revivals among the religious bodies, the invitation, "Come and join our church," was often extended to Joseph, but more particularly from the Presbyterians. Joseph was naturally inclined to be religious, and being young, and surrounded with this excitement, no wonder that he became seriously impressed with the necessity of serving the Lord. But as the cry on every hand was, "Lo, here is Christ," and "Lo, there!" Said he, "Lord, teach me, that I may know for myself, who among these are right." And what was the answer? "They are all out of the way; they have gone astray, and there is none that doeth good, no not one. When he found out that none were right, he began to inquire of the Lord what was right, and he learned for himself. Was he aware of what was going to be done? By no means. He did not know what the Lord was going to do with him, although He had informed him that the Christian churches were all wrong, because they had not the Holy Priesthood, and had strayed from the holy commandments of the Lord, precisely as the children of Israel did.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 12:67 (June 23, 1867)
Young’s recollection of religious excitement and events leading up to Joseph Smith, Jr.’s first vision.
1860s

Children, Family, Way, Boy

“…an adequate reform of public education in our school system cannot be accomplished by anything like a quick fix. We suspect that anyone who thinks otherwise cannot fully understand the shape of an adequate reform or all the obstacles to be overcome in achieving it.”

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

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

Education, School, Understanding, Thinking

“Liberalism, which Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name—“opportunism”—is an integral component of capitalism. When the citizens grow restive, it will soften and decry capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance and then later, when things grow quiet, are revoked on the inevitable road to capitalist slavery. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study for proof of Luxemburg’s observation.The political, cultural and judicial system in a capitalist state is centered around the protection of property rights. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, when civil government “is instituted for the security of property, [it] is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” The capitalist system is gamed from the start. And this makes Luxemburg extremely relevant as corporate capital, now freed from all constraints, reconfigures our global economy, including the United States’, into a ruthless form of neofeudalism.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Reform or Revolution" (2016)

Game, Reality, Study

“Upon this I sent to the Register who brought me the [twenty-four] articles, which I have read and find so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstance, as I think the Inquisitors of Spain use not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their prey. … this kind of proceeding is too much savouring of the Roman inquisition, and is rather a device to seek for offenders than to reform any.”

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–1598) English statesman

Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift, criticising the Court of High Commission which was persecuting nonconformists (1 July, 1584).
Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), p. 295.

Question, Thinking, Reading

“It might come as a surprise to many, but the truth is that Islam today no longer has a living and evolving theology. In fact, with few exceptions, Islam’s last genuine theologians belong to the early part of the 19th century. Go to any mosque anywhere, whether it is in New York or Mecca, and you are more likely to hear a political sermon rather than a theological reflection. In the highly politicized version of Islam promoted by Da’esh, al Qaeda, the Khomeinists in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Boko Haram in Nigeria, God plays a cameo role at best. Deprived of its theological moorings, today’s Islam is a wayward vessel under the captaincy of ambitious adventurers leading it into sectarian feuds, wars and terrorism. Many, especially Muslims in Europe and North America, use it as a shibboleth defining identity and even ethnicity. A glance at Islam’s history in the past 200 years highlights the rapid fading of theologians. Today, Western scholars speak of Wahhabism as if that meant a theological school. In truth, Muhammad Abdul-Wahhabi was a political figure. His supposedly theological writings consist of nine pages denouncing worship at shrines of saints. Nineteenth-century “reformers” such as Jamaleddin Assadabadi and Rashid Rada were also more interested in politics than theology. The late Ayatollah Khomeini, sometimes regarded as a theologian, was in fact a politician wearing clerical costume. His grandson has collected more than 100,000 pages of his writings and speeches and poetry. Of these, only 11 pages, commenting on the first and shortest verse of the Koran, could be regarded as dabbling in theology, albeit not with great success.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"The mad dream of a dead empire that unites Islamic rebels" http://nypost.com/2014/06/14/the-mad-dream-of-a-dead-empire-that-unites-islamic-rebels/, New York Post (June 14, 2014). New York Post

God, War, Truth, School

“I have sometimes felt that writers on the artistic aspect of photography have too often, like the reformers of religious creeds, led their followers into a condition of disbelief and unrest, and then left them to find out for themselves how to live up to new and vague beliefs, so many writers on Pictorial Photography have told us what to avoid without saying why, and have then told us what to do without showing how.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, p. 2

“Hell, the world isn’t worth reforming or even aiding as I can see. Men are swine and most women are fools. Befriend a man and he’ll betray you. Fondle a woman and she’ll double-cross you – whip her and she’ll cringe to you.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (c. early 1928)
Letters

Women, Men, World, Fools

“The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare, nor should this Court, ordained as a judicial body, be thought of as a general haven for reform movements.”

John Marshall Harlan II (1899–1971) American judge and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1899-1971)

Dissenting in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 624-25 (1964).

“Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship.
I’ve always supported comprehensive immigration reform – and at the same time – the elimination of birthright citizenship.
In addition, I plan to introduce legislation along the same lines as the proposed executive order from President”

Lindsey Graham (1955) United States Senator from South Carolina

7:45am https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1057282345991106560 then 7:51am https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1057283734519463937 then 11:01am https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1057286251517116416 as quoted 30 October 2018 by CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-birthright-citizenship-1.4883589 2010s

Support, Time

“Nations in this chambers have supported the efforts of dissidents and reformers and civil society advocates in newly free societies throughout the new United Nations Democracy Fund. And we appreciate those efforts. And as young democracies around the world continue to make brave stands for liberty, multilateral organizations like the United Nations must continue to stand with them.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

World, Democracy, Support, Effort

“This conference, with overwhelming agreement, unanimous agreement, has resolved that the expropriation of land without compensation should be among the mechanisms available to government to give effect to land reform and redistribution. It has also been resolved that in implementing this decision, we must insure that we do not undermine the economy, the agricultural production, and food security in our country.”

Cyril Ramaphosa (1952) 5th President of South Africa

On 20 December 2017 at the ANC's 54th national elective conference at Nasrec in Johannesburg, from a video and recording included in Top 5 quotes from Cyril Ramaphosa's closing address https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-12-21-watch--top-5-quotes-from-cyril-ramaphosas-closing-address/, TimesLive (21 December 2017)

Food, Decision, Country

“Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch. 8

Pleasure, History, Time

“The great English reform movement of the 19th century consisted wholly in repealing law. There was nothing constructive in it; it was wholly destructive. It was a destruction of Government's interference with human affairs, a destruction of the so-called ‘protection’ that is actually a restriction of the exercise of natural human rights. In that mid-19th-century period of the greatest individual freedom that Englishmen have ever known, they made the prosperity and power of the British Empire during Victoria's long and peaceful reign.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 239

https://mises.org/system/tdf/The%20Discovery%20of%20Freedom_2.pdf?file=1&type=document Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

Freedom, Exercises, Law, Peace

“Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

VI. Law and Communication. p. 110
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

Communication

“I never revolted in vain, as a rebel or as a tyrant, but I rose seeking reformation for the nation of my grandfather Muhammad. I intend to enjoin good and forbid evil, to act according to the traditions of my grandfather, and my father ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib.”

Husayn ibn Ali (626–680) The grandson of Muhammad and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.44, p. 329
Regarding the Advent of Karbalā

Evil

“For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular, and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better; and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving those of another to be so.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 2
Essais (1595), Book III

God, Angels, Imagination, Nature

“A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 363

Dead

“Fifty-six years after its founding by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, the church is fighting off calls by former members for a Reformation. The defectors say Sea Org members were repeatedly beaten by the church’s chairman, David Miscavige, often during planning meetings; pressured to have abortions; forced to work without sleep on little pay; and held incommunicado if they wanted to leave. The church says the defectors are lying.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

[Laurie, Goodstein, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/us/07scientology.html, Defectors Say Church of Scientology Hides Abuse, The New York Times, The New York Times Company, A1, March 6, 2010, 2010-07-03].
About

Lying, Sleep, Science, Fight

Quotes about reform page 5

Quotes about reform
page 5