Reformer Quotes

#1. And in some environments, talking like an overly-educated, holier-than-thou reformer is an automatic hook. Don't get any tribal feelings about that description, either. The most sanctimonious holier-than-thou people I know are progressive social activists, not religious zealots. (Ooooh. Look at all the labeling in that sentence!) #Quote by Rory Miller

#2. J. Gresham Machen solemnly warned, False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.1 #Quote by William Lane Craig

#3. I am not anyone to speak aloud of Adolf Hitler. His life and his actions do not invite sentimental emotions, because he was a warrior fighting for humanity, an apostle of the Gospel of the Rights of all peoples. He was a reformer of the highest rank. His historic destiny was to act in a time of unprecedented brutality, to which he eventually fell victim. So must any West European see Adolf Hitler. We, his followers, however, bow our heads before his disappearance. #Quote by Knut Hamsun

#4. A Day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged 'need' or relieve some alleged distress. #Quote by Henry Hazlitt

#5. The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures. #Quote by Margaret Halsey

#6. I have no question that Newt Gingrich has the heart of a conservative reformer, the ability to rally and captivate the conservative movement. #Quote by Rick Perry

#7. When we see a special reformer we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your own virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#8. PANDEMONIUM, n. Literally, the Place of All the Demons. Most of them have escaped into politics and finance, and the place is now used as a lecture hall by the Audible Reformer. #Quote by Ambrose Bierce

#9. Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere's law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward. #Quote by Thomas Mann

#10. The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer. #Quote by Learned Hand

#11. Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail. #Quote by Walter Lippmann

#12. For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes! #Quote by Adolf Hitler

#13. It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation. #Quote by Edward Gibbon

#14. My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline. #Quote by Ludwig Von Mises

#15. Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes. #Quote by E.W. Howe

#16. We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors, and who fights to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and poverty. #Quote by Ernesto Che Guevara

#17. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally allowable emotion, it may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman. #Quote by Aleister Crowley

#18. There has long been an iron rule in American social welfare policy: conditions must be worse for the dependent poor than for anyone who works. The seldom-acknowledged corollary is that the subsidized care of other people's children must be undesirable enough, or scarce enough, to play a role in this system of deterrence. In the late nineteenth century, charity reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell expressed this view when she insisted that the "honest laborer" should not see the children of the drunkard "enjoy advantages which his own may not hope for. #Quote by Nina Bernstein

#19. What we must remember, however, is that preservation of liberties does not depend on motives. A suppression of liberty has the same effect whether the suppressor be a reformer or an outlaw. The only protection against misguided zeal is constant alertness to infractions of the guarantees of liberty contained in our Constitution. Each surrender of liberty to the demands of the moment makes easier another, larger surrender ... #Quote by William O. Douglas

#20. One cannot have any respect or regard for men who take the position of the reformer and
then refuse to see the logical consequences of that position, let alone following them out in action. #Quote by B.R. Ambedkar

#21. Americans have gotten to know Sarah Palin. They know that she's a role model to women and other - and reformers all over America. She's a reformer. #Quote by John McCain

#22. Only a misunderstanding of Calvin's theology could prompt the question Why pray if God is sovereign? The Reformer himself might turn the question back on us: Why pray if God isn't sovereign? #Quote by Michael S. Horton

#23. People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher - a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over. #Quote by F Scott Fitzgerald

#24. A reformer is a man who sees the world's superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. #Quote by Fernando Pessoa

#25. The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense. He feels, with Copernicus, that as God waited long for an interpreter, so he can wait for his followers. #Quote by Wendell Phillips

#26. But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have
an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be
true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason
for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of
rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy
its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet
accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned
to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labor.
Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew
how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man
carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions
will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with
unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to
acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world #Quote by Albert Camus

#27. King Abdullah is a reformer. #Quote by Al-Waleed Bin Talal

#28. I'll tell what reckless is. What reckless is is calling [Bashar] Assad a reformer. What reckless is allowing Russia to come into Crimea and Ukraine. What reckless is is inviting Russia into Syria to team with Iran. That is reckless. And the reckless people are the folks in the White House right now. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the reckless people. #Quote by Chris Christie

#29. As Christians, I feel those of us in the creative community must seek to be more than scribes. If Diarmaid MacColloch is right in his immense history, The Reformation, we had plenty of Christian scribes on the eve of that enormous and painful upheaval. But it was the printing press that enabled the great thinkers of that time, both Reformer and Catholic, to transform our "assumptions about knowledge and originality of thought." I suggest now that we must seize the revolutionary media of our age in the way that those earlier Christians and Catholics seized the printed book. We must truly use the realistic novel, the television drama, and the motion picture to tell the Christian story anew. It is our obligation to tell that story over and over and to use the best means that we have. In that spirit this novel was written - with the hope of exploring and celebrating the mystery of the Hypostatic Union as well as the mystery of the Incarnation - in a wholly fresh way. #Quote by Anne Rice

#30. You cannot have a good character today and at the same time have a small mind and a little heart. You cannot have a good character today and be merely a petty reformer. #Quote by A. Powell Davies

#31. Pilates is my favorite meditative way to get in shape. I don't like the gym and I don't like running, so I just lay on my Pilates reformer. It's great. #Quote by Lyndsy Fonseca

#32. A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat. #Quote by Lydia Maria Francis Child

#33. The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter, but we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this, the most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (April 11, 1823) #Quote by Thomas Jefferson

#34. There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world's ills will be cured. #Quote by Henry Ford

#35. My life is too short to focus on legislation when I could be making art. So I'm not a copyright reformer, I'm a copyright abolitionist. #Quote by Nina Paley

#36. A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: Live for that better day. #Quote by Barbara W. Tuchman

#37. The blind spot for the in the Southern Progressive Movement - as for that matter in the national [progressive] movement - was the Negro, for the whole movement in the South coincided paradoxically with the crest of the wave of racism. Still more important to the association of the two movements was the fact that their leaders were often identical. In fact, the typical Progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disenfranchising or white-supremacy movement. #Quote by C. Vann Woodward

#38. 6. THE POSITION OF WOMAN Spiritually woman raised to the position of man. This is another subject on which great misunderstanding prevails. The belief that, according to the Qur'an, woman has no soul is almost general in the West. Probably it took hold of the mind of Europe at a time when Europeans had no access to the Qur'an. No other religious book and no other reformer has done one-tenth of what the Holy Qur'an or the Holy Prophet Muhammad has done to raise the position of woman. #Quote by Anonymous

#39. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would -be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions. #Quote by Karl Marx

#40. 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. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#41. I knew Deng Xiaoping when he came out of prison. He had, after all, been imprisoned for nearly ten years by Mao. I know what China looked like before he took over, and so in my own mind, I don't think of Deng Xiaoping as an oppressor. I think of somebody who, faced with that crisis, made a very painful and decision with which I cannot agree. But I also think of him as a great reformer. #Quote by Henry A. Kissinger

#42. I have a message for the world, which I will deliver without fear and care for the future. To the reformers I will point out that I am a greater reformer than any one of them. They want to reform only little bits. I want root-and-branch reform. #Quote by Swami Vivekananda

#43. The situation is established not only to provoke defensiveness but to sidetrack the reformer into answering the wrong questions.... In this, the pattern of discourse resembles that of dinnertime conversations about feminism in the early 1970s. Questions of definition often predominate. Whereas feminists were parlaying questions which trivialized feminism such as "Are you one of those bra burners?" vegetarians must define themselves against the trivializations of "Are you one of those health nuts?" or "Are you one of those animal lovers?" While feminists encountered the response that "men need liberation too," vegetarians are greeted by the postulate that "plants have life too." Or to make the issue appear more ridiculous, the position is forwarded this way: "But what of the lettuce and tomato you are eating; they have feelings too!"

The attempt to create defensiveness through trivialization is the first conversational gambit which greets threatening reforms. This pre-establishes the perimeters of discourse. One must explain that no bras were burned at the Miss America pageant, or the symbolic nature of the action of that time, or that this question fails to regard with seriousness questions such as equal pay for equal work. Similarly, a vegetarian, thinking that answering these questions will provide enlightenment, may patiently explain that if plants have life, then why not be responsible solely for the plants one eats at the table rather than for the larger quant #Quote by Carol J. Adams

#44. [Consider] a fence or gate erected across a road] The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." #Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

#45. I am for the artist, who is more alone than he looks. I am not for the reformer, who is always active but usually has nothing to give. The real thing that you do is a lonely thing. And remember the paradox that you become more social in order that you may become more of an individual. #Quote by Robert Frost

#46. A reformer cannot afford to have close intimacy with him whom he seeks to reform. True friendship is an identity of souls rarely to be found in this world. #Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

#47. Hillary Clinton called President Assad a "reformer". She called Assad a "different kind of leader".
There's now 400,000 now dead ... think about that. #Quote by Chris Christie

#48. In marriage, each partner is to be an encourager rather than a critic; a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts; an enabler rather than a reformer. #Quote by H. Norman Wright

#49. It had turned out that climbing a tree was more difficult than it looked. It was harder than warrior pose in yoga, than teaser in Pilates, than the elliptical or the Reformer. Rebecca thought that if no one had thought of it yet, soon enough someone in the city would spearhead a craze for tree climbing in Central and Prospect Parks, and it would become the talk of every cocktail party: have you tried that large oak by the Sheep Meadow? Oh, it's completely changed my body. #Quote by Anna Quindlen

#50. We've worked with President Yeltsin. He is the President of the country. He's been a reformer. We've been able to accomplish a number of things together. #Quote by Warren Christopher

#51. You have told yourself that you have found your knight in shining armor, my brother Rick. Isn't that the truth? You met him and he fit the bill, so you have told yourself a wonderful story and, stubborn brat that you are, you have been clinging to it ever since. After all, what could be more appropriate than for Francesca Cahill, reformer extraordinaire, to fall in love with my reform-minded Republican brother? But wait! Being as this is a love story, there has to be an unhappy middle and the perfect hero isn't quite so perfect after all. For he is married. Oh, wait! It isn't that bad, after all, for as it turns out he is a man of virtue, and he really loves you, while he despises his wife! And did I forget to mention that she is vile and evil? So the story can limp along, and true love might survive after all! Does this sound at all familiar, Francesca?"
"I almost hate you," she whispered. And she felt a tear sliding down her cheek. #Quote by Brenda Joyce

#52. Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world. #Quote by Eric Metaxas

#53. Deng Xiaoping thought of himself as a great revolutionary and a great reformer. He had dismantled the Chinese communist management of the economy. In my next-to-last conversation with him, which was about six months before Tiananmen Square, he said to me that his aim would be the next phase to reduce the Communist Party to philosophical issues. And I said, "What's a philosophical issue?" And he said, "Well, like if we make an alliance with Russia." Given his view of Russia, that was not the likeliest thing that would ever happen. #Quote by Henry A. Kissinger

#54. And I think Governor Romney has a shot if the 'R' next to his name doesn't just stand for 'Republican,' it stands for 'reformer.' #Quote by Scott Walker

#55. Hillary Clinton failed to mention that her agreement with a precipitous withdrawal and declaration of victory in 2011 helped left swaths of territory and weaponry from ISIS. She failed to mention that she described Bashar al-Assad as a positive reformer and opened an American embassy. She failed to mention a complete failure strategy in Libya, which now is enabling ISIS to move into Libya. #Quote by Carly Fiorina

#56. [T]he just society is one in which each man may seek the things which belong to his nature. By contrast, a system of economic totalitarianism treats the industrious and the idle, the able and the stupid, as if they were alike--which is contrary to the laws of justice. . . .

American society is imperfect; but all human societies are imperfect in some degree. The American economy has its faults; but they are faults that may be modified. A free economy, because of its opportunities for choice and competition, has always within it the possibilities of improvement; it does not repress the reformer. But a totalitarian economy, hostile to any sort of criticism, founded on envy and terror, cannot amend its ways without ceasing to be; it leaves no room for prudent reformation. When something in a free economy goes wrong, there is temporary trouble, but the variety of talents and the elasticity of the economic structure make mending fairly easy. When, however, something in a totalitarian economy goes wrong, there is general and serious suffering, because the master-plan of the regimented economy is inelastic and arbitrary. The free economy, in such conditions, penalizes only a few by loss of profit, or resort to bankruptcy. But when the totalitarian economy is brought to account for its mistakes, it seeks scapegoats; and the concentration camp substitutes for the bankruptcy-court. #Quote by Russell Kirk

#57. Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan's projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion. #Quote by John Irving

#58. I live for Pilates reformer class. I go at least three times a week. It's a great way to lengthen your muscles, stretch, and kind of relax your mind. #Quote by Shawn Johnson

#59. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, - such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#60. I'm not any kind of social reformer. #Quote by Charles Kuralt

#61. For the most part, China is a system maintainer, not a system reformer or system transformer. #Quote by Melvin Gurtov

#62. Anyone who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. #Quote by Ellen Key

#63. What is man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made? A renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good? Imitating that great Nature which embossoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, with every breath a new life? #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#64. [Beveridge] was a driven man, right to the end; his last words, enunciated clearly from his death bed at the age of eighty-four, showed that the aging social reformer was still haunted by the memory of those sick men on the East London streets. 'I have a thousand things to do,' he said, and died. #Quote by T.R. Reid

#65. The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorites; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer. #Quote by Freya Stark

#66. While we honour religion and believe it to be a powerful factor in elevating our race, we discriminate, as we hope our readers will also do, between it and dogmatism. Dogmatism has been the bane of civilization and a curse to mankind. It has degraded our sex, stifled intelligent inquiry, and persecuted every independent reformer and every noble cause. #Quote by Tennessee Celeste Claflin

#67. Innocent and virtuous, she represented the exact type of female he avoided... God, she was a taking thing, even for an avaricious reformer. #Quote by Karen Hawkins

#68. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions. If the citizen is to be a reformer, he must start with some ideal which he does not obtain merely by gazing reverently at the unreformed institutions. And if any one asks, as so many are asking: 'What is the use of my son learning all about ancient Athens and remote China and medieval guilds and monasteries, and all sorts of dead or distant things, when he is going to be a superior scientific plumber in Pimlico?' the answer is obvious enough. 'The use of it is that he may have some power of comparison, which will not only prevent him from supposing that Pimlico covers the whole planet, but also enable him, while doing full credit to the beauties and virtues of Pimlico, to point out that, here and there, as revealed by alternative experiments, even Pimlico may conceal somewhere a defect. #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#69. The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. #Quote by Henry Miller

#70. Become the destroyer of sects - become the breaker of privileges – become the messenger of equality – become the prophet of goodness. #Quote by Abhijit Naskar

#71. ...No reformer is worthy of the name if he fails to be the ultimate pacesetter in his own reform drive... #Quote by Janvier Chouteu-Chando

#72. There is a tradition that jumping off a precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. And the tradition is thereby mocked - to the peril of us all. #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#73. There's a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer. #Quote by Hillary Clinton

#74. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,
and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#75. Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated
but not in politics ... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer. #Quote by B.F. Skinner

#76. This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer. #Quote by Leo Tolstoy

#77. As a reformer the liberal is dissatisfied with things as they are because they violate his exceptionally tender conscience ... Liberalism does not advocate change for its own sake, but for the sake of something better in the direction of what he regards as good, namely, the maximum of liberty consistent with a regard for all men and all interests
the general happiness based on peace and justice. #Quote by Ralph Barton Perry

#78. If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank. #Quote by William Dean Howells

#79. Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer. #Quote by H.W. Brands

#80. In every community there are little knots of fantastic extremists who loudly proclaim that they are striving for righteousness, and who, in reality, do their feeble best for unrighteousness. Just as the upright politician should hold in peculiar scorn the man who makes the name of politician a reproach and a shame, so the genuine reformer should realize that the cause he champions is especially jeopardized by the mock reformer who does what he can to make reform a laughingstock among decent men. #Quote by Theodore Roosevelt

#81. I've always been a reformer all the time I served in public office, and remain a reformer in Ohio, but I also know how to get things done. And I think it's important that, while we acknowledge the anxieties that Americans have, I think it's also important we realize at the end of the day, we need to have somebody who knows how to land a plane, and I've landed quite a few planes #Quote by John Kasich