Quotes About Reform

I have a lot of stands on a lot of political issues. I'm very big on campaign finance reform. I still think most Americans aren't aware of how the dumping of big corporate dollars and private donor dollars has totally corrupted the political system and taken it away from them.

One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

There are more black men incarcerated today than there were slaves in 1850.

Men like me feel that untouchability is no integral part of Hinduism, it is an excrescence.

The political parties have unanimously rejected the one-man constitutional changes.

To try to make men equal by altering social arrangements is like trying to make the cards of equal value by shuffling the pack.

When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for.

That man's the true Conservative who lops the moldered branch away.

He was one of these men who think that the world can be saved by writing a pamphlet.

Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the [Oxford] common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizons of the place.

To know how to say what other people only think, is what makes poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers.

A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an' remains at large.

the rules had been changed

The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.

A healthy modern society must know how to remain the same as well as change, to conserve as well as to reform. Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.

The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.

The lunatic fringe in all reform movements.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.

A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

Our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics.