Reform Quotes

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

Samuel Johnson

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!

Thomas Babington Macaulay

People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.

Norman Douglas

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

Rebecca West

You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized.

Emmeline Pankhurst

A reformer is a guy who rides through the sewer in a glass bottom boat.

Mayor Jimmy Walker

If it was not absolutely necessary, it was the foolishest thing ever done.

Lord Melbourne

When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.

Horace Mann

Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

J.B.S. Haldane

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Socrates

A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.

Lydia Maria Child

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What you dislike in another take care to correct in yourself.

Thomas Sprat

Sarcasm spoils reproof.

E. Wigglesworh

The majority of people have not the courage to correct others because they don't have the courage to bear correction themselves.

Source Unknown

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

Henry David Thoreau

No one is to blame. It is neither their fault nor ours. It is the misfortune of being born when a whole world is dying.

Alexander Herzen

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

Alexis de Tocqueville