Quotes About Reform

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

We are working for a revolution. If we do not start it by improving the life of the soldiers, all slogans of reforming and improving society are but empty words.

You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

But such IMF pressure is very much helpful for me to push such a, you know, reform. So in this sense I think IMF is very much helpful for alien society.

Politics is an obsolete way of doing things. Although it was good a hundred years ago, it has no place in today's high tech society.

If you want to know how to solve society's problems, you start out with better public education.

Canada must be progressive, and Canada must be a just society.

Let me not be understood as saying that there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be religiously observed.

One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment … Most of the other problems, the ones that create a sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government's tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an 'Anglo-Saxon' economy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever.

Lewes and Eliot between them, someone has said, a little pretentiously but not wrongly, defined the liberalism of the oikos, the Greek word for home, whereas Trollope's is the liberalism of the polis, the city. Lewes and Eliot were more prescient of our own preoccupations: reform had to pass through the living room before it could move to Parliament.

The exclusive focus of the reform movement on Leopold's Congo seems even more illogical if you reckon mass murder by the percentage of the population killed. By these standards, the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today's Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.

John Newton had written that he was relieved to have left the trade because "I considered myself as a sort of gaoler or turnkey . . . perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles." But to leave behind a career as a prison guard is one thing; to call for closing all prisons entirely another.

every shell fired at the Boers, Lloyd George thundered, carried away with it an old-age pension.

FORMER CONGRESSMAN ALBERT Sidney Burleson of Texas had landed in Wilson's cabinet thanks to his longtime patron, Colonel House. Burleson "has been called the worst postmaster general in American history," writes the historian G. J. Meyer, "but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.

I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform a possible rapist without ever going to psychology school.

the people may undoubtedly change the government, not because it is ill exercised, but because they conceive another form will be more conducive to their welfare.

politics is about the improvement of people's lives." I

Roosevelt said, in April 1906, "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 the day.

The motor of our ingenuity is the question 'Does it have to be like this?', from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books.

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.

According to its Web site, Parent Revolution "invented" the idea of the "parent trigger" and persuaded the state senator Gloria Romero to include it in her education reform legislation. If 51 percent of the parents in a low-performing school sign a petition, the law says, the parents may take control of the school, its staff, and its budget, fire some or all of the staff, or turn the school over to a charter management

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to systemic reform was that it required numerous stakeholders - textbook publishers, test publishers, schools of education, and so on - to change, which turned out to be an insurmountable political obstacle.

As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm.