Reform Quotes

In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile. It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music, the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart. And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art's nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the soul. This is real religion. This is real worship

I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me. And I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill 'em.

Professional learning does not advance… through the inexorable confirmation of previous certainties, but through a systematic challenge to our present conceptions

Those born of God are called to reform their country, for that reason Christians need to have a victorious mentality

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.

All religions worthy of the name are now making great efforts to purify their doctrines and return to their original standpoint, — all except Christianity! You surely know that the nineteenth century Christianity is not the religion taught by Christ. Christ's religion has been changed and corrupted. But Christian clergymen are well aware that if they were to attempt to purify Christianity and bring it back to the religion of Christ, the result would be to reform it out of existence. Christianity stands to-day completely explained. Every step in its development is laid bare and shown to be due to purely natural causes, and it is easy to see how much Christianity adopted from other and older religions.

How can you reform when you are always busy conforming?

Let my silence grow with noise as pregnant mothers grow with life. Let my silence permeate these walls as sunlight permeates a home. Let the silence rise from unwatered graves and craters left by bombs. Let the silence rise from empty bellies and surge from broken hearts. The silence of the hidden and forgotten. The silence of the abused and tortured. The silence of the persecuted and imprisoned. The silence of the hanged and massacred. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so the hungry may eat my words and the poor may wear my words. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so I may resurrect the dead and give voice to the oppressed. My silence speaks.

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian imperial heir, was shot and killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Do you know the motive behind the act?It was in retaliation for the subjugation of the Sebs in Austria.It was not.Franz Ferdinand had stated his intention to introduce reforms favorable to the Serbs in his empire. Had he survived to ascend the throne, he would have made a revolution unnecessary. In plain terms, he was killed because he was going to give the rebels what they were shouting for. They needed a despot in the palace in order to seize it.What's good for reform is bad for the reformers

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

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.

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.

An indefinable something is to be done in a way nobody knows how at a time nobody knows when that will accomplish nobody knows what.

Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.

It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.

An educator...a good one that is, inspires others to be even better than herself.

In Your Early Years people Tell You, Correct You and Forgive You. But when you become an Adult, they Neither Correct you nor Forgive You

Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn’t solve any problems.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands.

Reinvent Yourself.Redesign Yourself.Reform Yourself.Restore Yourself.and if something is left of you till thenAppreciate Yourself.

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.

To make a crooked stick straight we bend it the contrary way.

297. We cannot reform without focusing on God and His principles

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

I wonder in what way I would function as a person, in a society without ever attending school. I'd be myself.

Big Brother is watching you.

Here is your great soul—the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself.

I survived. (J'ai vecu.)

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

All reformers are bachelors.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he's seventy he still wants to reform the world but he knows he can't.

If the surprise outcome of the recent UK referendum - on whether to leave or remain in the European Union - teaches us anything, it is that supposedly worthy displays of democracy in action can actually do more harm than good. Witness a nation now more divided; an intergenerational schism in the making; both a governing and opposition party torn to shreds from the inside; infinitely more complex issues raised than satisfactory solutions provided. It begs the question 'Was it really all worth it' ?

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

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.

All violence demands reform, and all violence desperately begs to be healed.

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

Negative habits eat you up. They’re the biggest roadblocks that prevent you from realising your fullest potential; and the very first step towards crafting real change is to become aware of all the destructive habits that squander you! An awareness of what needs to be improved, tackled, or abandoned will go a long way in restructuring your life. Make a list of all the lousy habits that you want to eliminate; and then roust them out of your life, before they chomp you up completely. Axe them, uproot them, throw them into the ocean and never look back.

The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.

Leaders do not conform; they reform. If you conform, you are nurturing mediocrity. If you reform, you are breeding change.

One revolution is like one cocktail it just gets you organized for the next.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation it is the prisons.

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.

I see dull people as projects ... to be reformed

We can only change life in the country and radically reform society by having God’s wisdom, strength and authority

The hole and the patch should be commensurate.

If we should promise people nothing better than only revolution they would scratch their heads and say 'Isn't it better to have good goulash?'

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

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake.

Your mental make-ups are the contents of your everyday thinking; they carry a charge that can either transform, reform or destroy you. Watch your thoughts, they determine your life!

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.

As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.If they make it that far.