Quotes About Reformers

Luther, the hero of Worms, the champion of the sacred rights of conscience, was, in words, the most violent, but in practice, the least intolerant, among the Reformers.

The work of reformers—long, hard, almost unimaginably difficult work—can lead to progress and a broader understanding of who is included in the phrase "We, the People" that opened the Preamble of the Constitution. And that work unfolds still.

To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have men such as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.

Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.

being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognised labour—a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state.

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.

But the reformers were right: the bovine digestive system is an extraordinarily efficient mechanism for converting grass, fodder, and even forage into fertilizer.15 Their shit-savings were a form of liquid capital.

By the late 1830s, Indianapolis reformers were boasting of sober Fourth of July celebrations, though some of Fort Wayne's leading citizens, including directors of the branch bank and members of the local temperance society, were carried home drunk on election day in 1836.

The heroic efforts and successes of the Reformers on the Continent, in the presence of Papal bulls and inquisitions, were a trumpet call to independence to the people of this priest-cursed land; and many responded right nobly, ready to stand amid the faggots at the stake rather than bear the iron heel that bruised them.

By insisting on "grace alone" the Reformers were denying that human methods, techniques, or strategies in themselves could ever bring anyone to faith. It is grace alone expressed through the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that brings us to Christ, releasing us from our bondage to sin and raising us from death to spiritual life.

The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.

The Milliken decision was pivotal in the postwar history of race relations, for it badly hurt whatever hopes reformers still maintained of overturning de facto segregation of the schools and of slowing a dynamic that was accelerating in many American urban areas: "white flight" of familes to suburbs.69 Flight in turn eroded urban tax bases, further damaging schools and other services in the cities.

After Moses's death, it fell to Joshua to conquer the Promised Land. The biblical book of Joshua still contains some ancient material, but this was radically revised by these same reformers, who interpreted it in the light of their peculiarly xenophobic theology. They give the impression that, acting under Yahweh's orders, Joshua massacred the entire population of Canaan and destroyed their cities.

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.

It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.

The subject of British abolitionism has long been controversial, complex, and even baffling. It also raises the issue of moral progress in history - whether groups of reformers and even nations can succeed in eliminating deeply entrenched forms of human oppression, and if so, by what methods, misconceptions, and under what conditions?

The term 'inequality' is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.

It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.

Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.

Much of the church rapidly lost the Reformers' consciousness of the noetic effects of sin, the impact of fallen human nature in darkening the unregenerate mind. Later theologians readily forgot that sin generates an unconscious drive to construct systems of understanding the world which suppress the knowledge of the real God, systems which deform and distort the facts and theories they incorporate.

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

Drug reformers get seduced by politicians who co-opt our language but who make no meaningful change. And when we don't hold politicians accountable, we contribute to harm.