Quotes About Reform

Some revolutions begin with a gunshot, others with a party. This

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A

Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.

The goal of the judicial system should be to rehabilitate wrongdoers rather than harming them

When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering.

liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it's better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones. By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.

Either way, I suspect that it's less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on.

After all, in the absence of electoral reform the richest donors can get the ear of politicians whether they earn 2 percent of national income or 8 percent of it.20

If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the

But subtler accommodations instigated by breakaway denominations, reform movements, ecumenical councils, and other liberalizing forces have allowed other religions to be swept along by the humanistic tide. It is when fundamentalist forces stand athwart those currents and impose tribal, authoritarian, and puritanical constraints that religion becomes a force for violence.

Mass incarceration, even if it does lower violence, introduces problems of its own. Once the most violent individuals have been locked up, imprisoning more of them rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, because each additional prisoner become less and less dangerous, and pulling them off the streets makes a smaller and smaller dent in the violence rate.

Cuando la estructura de una institución se ha vuelto corrupta -sobre todo de acuerdo a sus propios principios- criticarla es un acto de amistad.

The rot must be revealed before something sound can be put in its place,

For one thing, we're doing publishing wrong.

Without economic development, any potential for political openness and freedom will be questionable.

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

We must make immigration a legal, orderly process to eliminate this issue, not further criminalize it.

Como dijo Gustav Schmoller, «la revolución puede evitarse siempre con las reformas oportunas».

The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.

Primero una fundación de la orden trapense tradicional. Después una reforma de la orden trapense. Después una fundación fuera de esa orden. Por último, una pequeña comunidad llevando una vida sencilla sin regla y sin hábito.

There is only one kind of land reform today: expropriation.

Congress should eliminate absolute immunity for prosecutorial misconduct and for police officers who commit perjury.

Congress also should change the federal civil rights statute, 42 U.S. Code Section 1983, to hold cities liable for the misconduct of their police officers.

Reform or no reform, he never ceased to promote the interests of St. Denis and the Royal House of France with the same naive, and in his case not entirely unjustified, conviction of their identity with those of the nation and with the Will of God as a modern oil or steel magnate may promote legislation favorable to his company and to his bank as something beneficial to the welfare of this country and to the progress of mankind.