Quotes About Reform

After the Wall

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

It is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of transition

The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk, I'm going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America.

Health care reform, the marquee legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration's first term, was passed before we entered the world of divided government.

Power must be used, but it must be tempered by soul-searching and the recognition of our human capacity for error. That is the maxim that should inform our approach to every challenge, from reforming state government to engaging in foreign affairs.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable.

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires...

This steadfast devotion to Latin and Greek as the basis of a liberal education instead of science or math, however, did not start as willful blindness or upper-class bias.24 It simply reflected the fact that in Erasmus's time, both languages were essential for reading the printed books of the day and for understanding Scripture as the first step toward reforming an intellectually bankrupt Church.

self-conscious principle: change as reform, rather than revolution.

Yet what you need is not marches, demonstrations, rallies or wide associations, all of them are important. What you need is direct action. The sooner people understand that, the sooner we'll begin to change things.

la Santa Madre Iglesia —dijo por fin, sin volverse—. Tan católica, apostólica y romana que ha terminado traicionando su mensaje original. Con la Reforma perdió la mitad de Europa, y en el siglo XVIII excomulgó a la Razón. Cien años más tarde perdió a los trabajadores, que comprendieron que estaba del lado de los amos y los opresores. En este siglo que termina está perdiendo a la juventud y a las mujeres.

Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, has caused this Dhamma edict to be written. Here (in my domain) no living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice. Formerly, in the kitchen of Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, hundreds of thousands of animals were killed every day to make curry. But now with the writing of this Dhamma edict only three creatures, two peacocks and a deer are killed, and the deer not always. And in time, not even these three creatures will be killed.

Once you're in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don't want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions.

Growth requires reinvestment.

I worry that even those who want to reform are not quite sure how to go about it. There is so much to be done.

The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.

For me, 'revolution' simply means radical change.

The argument in this book is that religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform. Non-doctrinal factors—such as the Saudis' use of oil revenues to fund Wahhabism and Western support for the Saudi regime—are important, but religious doctrine is more important. Hard as it may be for many Western academics to believe, when people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are not trying somehow to dignify their underlying socioeconomic or political grievances.

It is possible to free oneself—to adapt one's faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression.