Reformer Quotes & Sayings

For the most part, China is a system maintainer, not a system reformer or system transformer. — Melvin Gurtov

If normative relativism is true, then it is logically impossible for a society to have a virtuous, moral reformer like Jesus Christ, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr. Why? Moral reformers are members of a society who stand outside that society's code and pronounce a need for reform and change in that code. However, if an act is right if and only if it is in keeping with a given society's code, then the moral reformer is by definition an immoral person, for his views are at odds with those of his society. Moral reformers must always be wrong because they go against the code of their society. But any view that implies moral reformers are impossible is defective. — J.P. Moreland

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God. — Charles Kingsley

A reformer should be exempt from the suspicion of interest, and he must possess the confidence and esteem of those whom he proposes to reclaim. — Edward Gibbon

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer. — Charles Caleb Colton

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. — Brenda Joyce

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

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

But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State. — Thomas Jefferson

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 — John Kasich

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. — B.F. Skinner

Hindu philosophy was one of the greatest beneficiaries of the advent and the teachings of the Lord Buddha. I revere Buddha as a reformer of not only Hinduism but also the world, who has given all of us a new world view and vision which is critical for the survival of all of us and the entire world. — Narendra Modi

The hammer and the anvil are the two hemispheres of every true reformer's character. — J.G. Holland

And it would be a bit out of character. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have started out as a reformer, but he really enjoys being seen as a larger-than-life tough-guy figure. He doesn't go on photographed hunting expeditions, for instance. But he does have hero moments, such as when his convoy stopped in the middle of the Bosphorus Bridge and he allegedly talked down a jumper, prevented him from committing suicide. — Peter Kenyon

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. — Chris Christie

Use the KEY to change: Knowledge Empowers You! — Andrew Kreig

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. — A. Powell Davies

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

There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an owl-like look, "which always have been and always will be, which can't be changed."
Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly. "Listen to that! That's what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man
a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature. Every person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery. — Ernesto Che Guevara

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. — John Irving

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail. — James Russell Lowell

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. — Henry A. Kissinger

I own I never really warmed
To the reformer or reformed.
And yet conversion has its place
Not halfway down the scale of grace. — Robert Frost

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. — Henry Hazlitt

I am glad you like what I said of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry (prison and mental hospital reformer). She is very unpopular with the clergy; examples of living, active virtue disturb our repose and give one to distressing comparisons; we long to burn her alive. — Sydney Smith

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. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer. — H.W. Brands

The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart. — James Oakes

[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." — Gilbert K. Chesterton

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. — Mahatma Gandhi

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. — Lyndsy Fonseca

Contemporaries relate that hearing Martin Luther pray was "an experience in theology". They said the reformer began praying with such humility that he could be pitied, only to proceed with such boldness before God that the human hearer would fear for him. — A.W. Tozer

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. — G.K. Chesterton

If every Christian will have an active civil position, he can become a reformer in his country — Sunday Adelaja

It is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not society, from which he should expect nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and even mortal persecution. — Mahatma Gandhi

Ram Mohan Roy would have been a greater reformer and Lokmanya Tilak a greater scholar if they had not to start with the handicap of having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English. — Mahatma Gandhi

The mind is not sealed in the skull but extends throughout the body. We think not only with our brain but also with our eyes and ears, nose and mouth, limbs and torso. And when we use tools to extend our grasp, we think with them as well. "Thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be," wrote the American philosopher and social reformer John Dewey in 1916. "Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes in the brain."51 To act is to think, and to think is to act. — Nicholas Carr

[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. — T.R. Reid

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. — Tennessee Celeste Claflin

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. — B.R. Ambedkar

I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes — George Soros

A reformer knows neither how to do nor to undo. — Jose Bergamin

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. — Chris Christie

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

Dr. Arnold ... the admired reformer of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst of furious indignation against this opinion will be forced to the conclusion that he enjoyed inflicting floggings. — Bertrand Russell

There is a curious mental stimulus to a good but stupid woman in a bad man's badness. If she has a touch of the reformer in her, as most good women have, she soon becomes obsessed with the futile desire to save him from himself. And in seven cases out of ten her first step in doing so is to descend to his level. "Not — Anthony Berkeley

I'm no reformer; for I see more lightThan darkness in the world; mine eyes are quickTo catch the first dim radiance of the dawn,And slow to note the cloud that threatens storm. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The fundamental beliefs that the Genevan Reformer held regarding God's Word and the centrality of the Scriptures in church life defined his preaching long before he ever stood to exposit the Word. Calvin's deeply embedded convictions about the supreme authority of the Bible demanded an elevated view of the pulpit. He believed the pulpit must be primary in the life of the church because Scripture is sovereign over the lives of the people. — Anonymous

Back in 2008, candidate Obama called a $10 trillion national debt 'unpatriotic' - serious talk from what looked to be a serious reformer. Yet by his own decisions, President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him, and more than all the troubled governments of Europe combined. One president, one term, $5 trillion in new debt. — Paul Ryan

The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right. — G.K. Chesterton

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — G.K. Chesterton

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? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

George W. Bush has a new campaign slogan: "A reformer with results." I don't know what it means [but] I think it's better than his old campaign slogan: "A dumb guy with connections. — David Letterman

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.' — Scott Walker

Being a pioneering reformer is all fine and good, but it does leave one terribly in want of a
good party! — Jenny Holiday

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. — H. Norman Wright

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

The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever more dangerous. Jesus had to work on the perilous confines of reason and religion; and a step to the right or left might place him within the grasp of the priests of the superstition, a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. — Thomas Jefferson

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. — Warren Christopher

Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, "a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns." This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed best in a vibrant Christian life. — Stephen Mansfield

Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor. — Derrick A. Bell

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. — Wendell Phillips

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. — Carly Fiorina

Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government. — B.R. Ambedkar

The reformer is one who with clarion voice will call the ministry back to it's knees. — Edward McKendree Bounds

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, 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." This — G.K. Chesterton

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. — Shawn Johnson

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. — C. Vann Woodward

The reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes. — E.W. Howe

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. — Margaret Halsey

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 ... — William O. Douglas

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. — John McCain

The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer. — Learned Hand

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. — Karl Marx

One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs. — Richard Holloway

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. — Swami Vivekananda

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. — Anna Quindlen

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

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. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. — Anonymous

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. — Ernesto Che Guevara

They say I am a reformer. They say wrong: for I have long since given up any such chimerical idea, as that of being able to make men happier who are wicked and miserable by prescription. Withdrawing, therefore, from any such Utopian and hopeless attempt, I believed the best thing I could do was, to relieve, where I could, individual distress, and to lighten the chains that villany often imposes on simplicity under the name of law. In this I have done some good, and what else ought a man to do on this earth? — Charlotte Turner Smith

I'm not any kind of social reformer. — Charles Kuralt

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. — Henry David Thoreau

It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation. — Edward Gibbon

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. — Aleister Crowley

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. — Ellen Key

History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it. — John Buchan

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. — Henry Miller

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. — Henry Ford

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!) — Rory Miller

The problem of the social reformer, therefore, is not merely to seek means of security, for if these means when found provide no deep satisfaction the security will be thrown away for the glory of adventure. — Bertrand Russell

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia — Leo Tolstoy

Agitate! Agitate! Ought to be the motto of every reformer. Agitation is the opposite of stagnation - the one is life, the other death. — Ernestine Rose

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. — Theodore Roosevelt

In a situation where flesh is consumed, vegetarians inevitably call attention to themselves. They have made something absent on their plates; perhaps a verbal demurral has been required as well. They then are drawn into a discussion regarding their vegetarianism. Frequently, there will be someone present who actually feels hostile to vegetarianism and regards it as a personal challenge. If this is the case, all sorts of outrageous issues are thrown out to see how the vegetarian will handle them. The vegetarian, enthusiastic reformer, sees the opportunity as one of education; but it is not. instead it is a teasing game of manipulation. At times, ludicrous questions are raised; they imply that the entire discussion is ludicrous. — Carol J. Adams

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail. — Walter Lippmann