Quotes About Reform

This new middle-class elite sought reforms against the interests of a political class that had succeeded in mobilizing the vast mass of nonelite voters into the patronage system.

So the possibility of a basic bargain on immigration reform has existed for some time. In a trade, the government would undertake serious enforcement measures to control its borders, in return for an agreement to give undocumented aliens without criminal records a path toward citizenship.10 This bargain might actually receive majority support among the American public, but hard-core immigration opponents are dead set against any form of "amnesty

In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is often not a sign of reform but of a power grab.

Education is too important to be left solely to the educators.

the government in Beijing continues to define itself as Marxist-Leninist, though 'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt.

Un gobierno que se vende como honesto modifica la ley para ajustarla a sus caprichos; otorga directamente, sin licitación, contratos multimillonarios o, para inhibir las previsibles protestas por la construcción de la nueva refinería de Dos Bocas, auspicia una reforma al Código Penal de Tabasco, la llamada "ley garrote".

I want to initiate a change in society in the long term.

The lack of ability of those in charge to get a grip on a situation, and to take immediate, decisive action rather than simply debate everything endlessly, is one of the major problems in the State education system.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

1793, the year was now divided in 12 months renamed after nature and the seasons. Each month counted three equal 10-day periods, and the additional 5 days found the year were de facto holidays. But the name of the months

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

On the contrary we must persuade ourselves that colonialism is incapable of procuring for colonized peoples the material conditions likely to make them forget their quest for dignity. Once colonialism has understood where its social reform tactics would lead it, back come the old reflexes of adding police reinforcements, dispatching troops, and establishing a regime of terror better suited to its interests and its psychology. (147)

They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.

Ethnography must become self-critical, imaginative, and constructive; the field worker must be a willing agent of reform, but without sacrificing his scientific integrity.

Privatization is a bitter pill but it is a pill that will cure.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

What I need to do," Wayne said, "is get the whole city drunk." "Or, you know, advocate workers' rights to bring down working hours, improve conditions, and meet a base minimum of pay.

Young Christians are sick of pablum. It doesn't work anymore. They are tired of rabbinical hair-splitting, empty liturgical apparatus, Sunday school minutiae, the ghostly voices of the old regime; they reject stuck minds and methods and by their indifference to structures and traditional authorities

The institutional church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?