Quotes About Reform

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

You know there comes a time when time itself is ready for change.

To attempt radical reform without adequate organization is like trying to sail a boat without a rudder.

The hard cold facts today indicate that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structure of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.

On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer.

May intelligent, bookish ladies sometimes be reformed? he asked her. She thought about it. I suppose it may be within the bounds of possibility, she said, even if not of probability.

Did you ever hear of a congress of lawyers for simplifying the law and discouraging litigation? What

Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just human rights, and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

BILL THOMAS WANTED to remake the nursing home.

While there is wisdom in refraining from implementing change merely for the sake of change, clinging to old ways solely for the sake of their antiquity is obviously equally futile.

This bureaucracy had been created after 9/11 because of political

but until we fix the government policies that breed poverty, we have condemned the poor, black, white, and brown to a life of economic slavery

For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root - Thoreau

Trump now exerting new forces in relation to immigration and the development of education

There's precious little reform in the human race.

well-meaning Christians almost killed the faith eight hundred years ago

That's why liberals are constantly discovering new crises that require more government solutions.

John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: "A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life."44

But revolutions don't happen because of one or two individuals; they happen because the majority wakes up and realizes that things must change.

No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.

practically every political reformer in the country—and, for that matter, practically every schoolchild—will tell you that machines are rotten, that careerists are slimy, and that what politics needs is more popular participation, more attention to issues, more transparency, more disinterest, more fresh faces.

the continuous and systematic onslaught against political machines and insiders by progressivism, populism, and libertarianism—three very different political reform movements which nonetheless all regard transactional politics as at best a necessary evil and more often as corrupt and illegitimate. This attack, though well intentioned, has badly damaged the country's governability, a predictable result (and one accurately predicted more than fifty years ago).

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives.