Quotes About Reform

This is very personal for me," said Nicholas Alahverdian. "I was a legislative aide for the House of Representatives at the same time I was in the night-to-night program. I was hurt in the group homes and shelters, and legislators saw the bruises and cuts and decided something needed to be done."

the new order promised stability, where for years there had been only chaos.

One legacy of this policy blunder is that 70 million Americans now have a criminal record, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That's slightly more than the number of Americans with a college degree, and we have more jails and prisons than four-year colleges.

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. —WALTER CRONKITE, former anchor for CBS Evening News

we have been content to drivel along with our current educational systems, most of which neglect all the essential things and leave their victims for all intents and purposes quite untrained. - Aldous Huxley, 1934

For this reason, within China the four state-owned banks in the 1980s were invariably referred to as "specialized banks" (????

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

Most of what needs to be changed in the euro zone can be done without treaty changes. The demand for treaty change is as political as it is legal and I don't think it's going to happen soon.

I didn't become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It's not the be all and end all for us. There are other very, very key ambitions in politics, not least social mobility and life chances, that I care about as passionately if not more.

anonymous blogger can print a leaked document or run a denunciation of an abuse of power. But if the abuse is to be tackled, then the blogger or the people who have read his or her work must go out and campaign for change in public.

The anarchy that threatens a degrading society is not its punishment, but its remedy.

Reformar la sociedad por medio de leyes es el sueño del ciudadano incauto y el preámbulo discreto de toda tiranía. La ley es forma jurídica de la costumbre o atropello a la libertad.

Humanity will one day solemnly recall the events that initiated the dismantlement of the industrial society.

In the bosom of the Church today, 'integralists' are those who do not understand that Christianity needs a new theology, and 'progressives' are those who do not understand that the new theology must be Christian.

I think that politics needs a bit of spicing up.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev

The offender must be able to give something back. But criminals are most often poor people. They have nothing to give. The answers to this are many. It is correct that our prisons are by and large filled with poor people. We let the poor pay with the only commodity that is close to being equally distributed in society: time.

Look for alternatives to punishments, not only alternative punishments.

For it is better -- is it not? -- to attempt to change things slowly than not to strive for progress at all.

Don't try to reform yourself; just see the futility of all change. The changeful keeps on changing while the changeless is waiting.

Both leftists and conservatives have, in their different ways, contributed to a slack public educational system, which is particularly feeble when it comes to science. Neither faction is likely to accept serious reform gracefully, the left because of its dogmatic anti-elitism, the right because of its own version of anti-elitism as well as its resistance to public expenditure and its fervent preference for "localism" in all things.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

I fretted myself about the mistakes of government, like other people; but finding myself every day grow more angry, and the government growing no better, I left it to mend itself.

For much of the Communist era, scholars tended to look back on Sun as one more unsuccessful, reform-minded leader, and his Three People's Principles as just another of modern China's many dead-end political experiments. As one biographer wrote: "If Sun Yat-sen had one consistent talent, it was for failure.