Quotes about reform

Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.

— Louisa May Alcott

Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

— Susan B. Anthony

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

— Charles Bukowski

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

— Thomas Carlyle

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.

— Thomas Carlyle

People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this, -- that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.

— John Jay Chapman

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

— Lydia M. Child

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, which will itself need reforming.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.

— Eugene Delacroix

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

— Norman Douglas

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

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.

— William E. Gladstone

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.

— John B. S. Haldane

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

I think I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

— Edgar Watson Howe

The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.

— Aldous Huxley

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 B. Macaulay

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

— Lord Melbourne

If there are people who feel that God wants them to change the structures of society, that is something between them and their God. We must serve him in whatever way we are called. I am called to help the individual; to love each poor person. Not to deal with institutions. I am in no position to judge.

— Mother Teresa

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

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

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

— Alexis De Tocqueville

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

— Mark Twain

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

— Voltaire

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

— Mayor Jimmy Walker

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

— H.G. Wells

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

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.

— Moliere