Quotes About Reform

[On reducing the federal government:] Starve the beast.

But you say, does it represent change? The change is that we are fighting an insurance industry that has killed health reform for generations. They're spending tens of millions of dollars right now to defeat this bill, and we're on the doorstep of winning a great victory for the American people.

The Democrats' website is accurate when it says that the Democratic efforts for civil rights "began" with Truman in 1946, for there certainly is much about civil rights that they would rather not talk about before that time.

Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.

Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.

The massive sexual dysfunction of the contemporary Catholic Church began with Augustine.

The popes who succeeded John XXIII were in clericalism's grip, which is why the reforms of his council didn't have a chance.

At the most practical level, a reformed, enlightened, hopeful Catholic Church is essential to the thriving — even to the survival — of the human species.

Yet "perfection," as C. Northcote Parkinson shrewdly noted, "is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

Why not pay prime ministers and presidents even a tiny share of the gain that their policies promote?

Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.

Money has too big an influence on our politics in Washington and somehow we need to do something about that.

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be to-morrow.

The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.

New Mexico Governor Gary E. Johnson, a Republican and tri-athlete, has stated publicly that "Our present course is not working. Our War on Drugs is a real failure.

Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.

In the 1890s the reform journalist E. L. Godkin alleged that Tammany leaders feared biography more than the penitentiary.

These and other measures, however, seemed relatively inconsequential in 1965 compared to a Big Four that passed by the end of the session: federal aid to elementary and secondary education, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and a civil rights act to guaranteee voting rights.

The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform.

The vice presidency "ought to be abolished," he told his friend Leonard Wood. "The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.

Progressives (a combination of Midwestern

Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.

As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. "It is never well to take drastic action," he liked to say, "if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.

Observing this widespread failure to rectify conditions, Roosevelt recalled, "I became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether business men or lawyers, judges, legislators, or executive officers, who seek to make of the Constitution a fetish for the prevention of the work of social reform.