Quotes about reform

The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.

President Barack Obama and many liberal-minded commentators have been hesitant to call this Islamist ideology by its proper name. They seem to fear that both Muslim communities and the religiously intolerant will hear the word “Islam” and simply assume that all Muslims are being held responsible for the excesses of the jihadist few.I call this the Voldemort effect, after the villain in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Many well-meaning people in Ms. Rowling’s fictional world are so petrified o

297. We cannot reform without focusing on God and His principles

We cannot reform without focusing on God and His principles

There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake.

(Dune's Frank) Herbert made religion the inescapable instrument of cultural change.

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.

Professional learning does not advance… through the inexorable confirmation of previous certainties, but through a systematic challenge to our present conceptions

Those born of God are called to reform their country, for that reason Christians need to have a victorious mentality

Reforms should begin at home and stay there.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he's seventy he still wants to reform the world but he knows he can't.

We are reformers in Spring and Summer in Autumn and Winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night.

Reform must come from within not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue.

The hole and the patch should be commensurate.

To make a crooked stick straight we bend it the contrary way.

An indefinable something is to be done in a way nobody knows how at a time nobody knows when that will accomplish nobody knows what.

A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival.

Every reform was once a private opinion and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

All reformers are bachelors.

Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.

Thinkers prepare the revolution bandits carry it out.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal and equals that they may be superior.

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Whatever little we have gained we have gained by agitation while we have uniformly lost by moderation.

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

One revolution is like one cocktail it just gets you organized for the next.

A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

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

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.

It is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save his honour his religion his soul and lay the foundation for that empire's fall or its regeneration.

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.

It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation it is the prisons.

By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.

The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

If we should promise people nothing better than only revolution they would scratch their heads and say 'Isn't it better to have good goulash?'

I survived. (J'ai vecu.)

Big Brother is watching you.

In principle, to be sure, the Reformation idea of the universal priesthood of all believers meant that not only the clergy but also the laity, not only the theologian but also the magistrate, had the capacity to read, understand, and apply the teachings of the Bible. Yet one of the contributions of the sacred philology of the biblical humanists to the Reformation was an insistence that, in practice, often contradicted the notion of the universal priesthood: the Bible had to be understood on the

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.

All violence demands reform, and all violence desperately begs to be healed.

Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multipli

I was trying to foment a little dissension.' He paused. 'No, that's too flippant. How about trying to make the system less warlike—injecting a little love?' He snorted. 'Through violence, of course, like all religious reformers.

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.

How can you reform when you are always busy conforming?

If you conform, you can never reform.

Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands.

Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.

It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me. And I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill 'em.

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

The biggest issue that we have to contend with is campaign finance reform.

It starts with campaign finance reform.

Here is your great soul—the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile. It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and kis

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced an

The spirit is one of the most neglected parts of man by doctors and scientists around the world. Yet, it is as vital to our health as the heart and mind. It's time for science to examine the many facets of the soul. The condition of our soul is usually the source of many sicknesses.

I see dull people as projects ... to be reformed

Negative habits eat you up. They’re the biggest roadblocks that prevent you from realising your fullest potential; and the very first step towards crafting real change is to become aware of all the destructive habits that squander you! An awareness of what needs to be improved, tackled, or abandoned will go a long way in restructuring your life. Make a list of all the lousy habits that you want to eliminate; and then roust them out of your life, before they chomp you up completely. Axe them, upr

Christians, as messengers of God should bring restoration to this earth, become the people who can reform society and the country

The proper task of social reform is to remove poverty from society and to ensure that people do not sell their conscience to make a living.

When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian imperial heir, was shot and killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Do you know the motive behind the act?It was in retaliation for the subjugation of the Sebs in Austria.It was not.Franz Ferdinand had stated his intention to introduce reforms favorable to the Serbs in his empire. Had he survived to ascend the throne, he would have made a revolution unnecessary. In plain terms, he was killed because he was going to give the rebels what they were shouti

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in

Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult! ... Don't I know that perhaps it's impossible! But it's the only way to do it. Therefore, I say, let's try to get it done. And everybody says, 'difficult, difficult,' and nobody lifts a finger to try. And the only real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted! Every decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares?

We can only change life in the country and radically reform society by having God’s wisdom, strength and authority

I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is!

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? …At the beginning of our epoch men

An educator...a good one that is, inspires others to be even better than herself.

[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all!Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language stri

I wonder in what way I would function as a person, in a society without ever attending school. I'd be myself.

As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.If they make it that far.

For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.