Quotes About Reform

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times.

I wish that the Democrats would put some effort into Social Security reform, illegal immigration's reform, tax reform, or some of the other real issues that are out there.

It is my great desire to reform my subjects, and yet I am ashamed to confess that I am unable to reform myself.

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.

There is an analogy between conservation and education reform. The coalition around education reform is the biggest bipartisan thing going in this state right now. We need to recapture the big bipartisan spirit for conservation.

I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.

People who know the economy is rigged in favor of big money, people who know that our middle class continues to decline and we have to go outside of establishment politics and economics, people who know that we need to reform a broken criminal justice system and we need comprehensive immigration reform.

Because clearly the most amazing thing had happened: by some chance - no, the lover does not believe in chance, but destiny - destiny had arranged it so that the man and woman who had made the original whole, then somehow divided and separated by an angry God, had met up again, and now must reform the rightful, righteous whole. At once!

Medical liability reform is not a Republican or Democrat issue or even a doctor versus lawyer issue. It is a patient issue.

Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.

You might as well try and dam Niagara Falls with toothpicks as to stop the reform wave sweeping our land.

I basically believe the medical insurance industry should be nonprofit, not profit-making. There is no way a health reform plan will work when it is implemented by an industry that seeks to return money to shareholders instead of using that money to provide health care.

The reason we've been growing at 1.8 percent for the last eight, ten years, which is way below the historical average, is in large part because of our tax code. It is important to us to get the biggest, broadest tax reduction, tax cuts, tax reform that we can possibly get because it's the only way we get back to 3 percent growth. That's what's driving all of this, how do you get the American economy back on that historical growth rate of 3 percent and out of these doldrums of 1.8, 1.9 that we had of the previous Barack Obama administration?

I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.

Political reform need not go hand in hand with economic liberalization.. I hold unconventional views about this.. I do not believe if you are a libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed.

I've got a reason for running. I talk about a larger goal, which is to call upon the best of America. It's part of the renewal. It's reform and renewal. Part of the renewal is a set of high standards and to remind people that the greatness of America really does depend on neighbors helping neighbors and children finding mentors. I worry. I'm very worried about, you know, the kid who just wonders whether America is meant for him. I really worry about that.

My goal for reform is not necessarily to pass laws but to make sure the laws are being followed.

You don't get real reform by pandering to every special interest. With cap and trade we wound up with a bill that didn't accomplish much, was enormously complicated and expensive.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

Managing the other fellow's business is a fascinating game. Trade unionists all over the country have pronounced ideas for the reform of Wall Street banks; and Wall Street bankers are not far behind in giving plans for the tremendous improvement of trade union policies. Wholesalers have schemes for improving the retailer; the retailer knows just what is wrong in the conduct of wholesale business-and we might go through a long list.... Yet for some reason the classes that ought to be helped keep on stubbornly clinging to their own method of running their affairs.

In our view, successful reform is not an event. It is a sustainable process that will build on its own successes - a virtuous cycle of change.

Trade reform has also been linked to increased income disparity as skilled workers have captured more benefits from globalization than their unskilled counterparts.

There are now that 20 consent decrees in place like the one in Baltimore that are helping put broken police departments on a path to reform. And this is long work. Baltimore is just embarking down this road.

Then by the springtime, you'll see us moving an effort to cut taxes for working families, small businesses and family farms to reform our business taxes in this country so that American businesses can compete more effectively with businesses around the world.

The Board of Inquiry report fails to recognize that the central problem in the Los Angeles Police Department is the culture. The reality is there will not be meaningful reform in the Los Angeles Police Department until the culture is changed.

So, very early reports are that Obamacare exchanges are, as expected, having some technical glitches on the first day - maybe even a bit worse than expected, because it appears that volume has been much bigger than predicted. Here’s what you need to know: this is good, not bad, news for the program... Lots of people logging on and signing up on the very first day... is an early indication that it’s going to be fine, that plenty of people will sign up for the first year of health reform.

Governments must commit to sound economic and financial policies. This is how we ensure reform in the euro area - and our independence.

To err and not reform, this may indeed be called error.

My view of university training is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. It is not a hardening, or settling process. Education is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to think straight if possible; but to think always for themselves.

Weirdly enough, the best thing that ever happened to black people in the last twenty or thirty years was the O.J. Simpson verdict because it shut down the white guilt bank. And white guilt has never led to anything good. It's brought us spiraling crime rates, mostly with black victims, and a permanent underclass living in public housing projects. For years, liberals cried that "law and order" and "welfare reform" were racist code words.

Bentham spent much of his life writing constitutions and proposing legal reform in the light of his utilitarianism. The evaluation of particular acts was hardly his concern. The psychology of his day was hedonistic and he worked in that framework and passed it on to Mill, but it is clear as day that Mill was not a hedonist in the sense in which we use that term today, though he used the language of pleasure and pain to express his views.

There ought to be a thoughtful welfare-reform debate that doesn't turn into something that could be called scapegoating.

The billionaires pay an effective tax rate lower than nurses or truck drivers. That makes no sense at all. There has to be real tax reform, and the wealthiest and large corporations will pay.

When we were working on immigration reform and there was a young Latino man, young immigration activist here who, in the Roosevelt Room, refused to shake my hand.He made a point of saying, "I can't shake your hand; you're deporting too many people." And I just said to him, "Young man, I'm glad that you feel so passionately about this issue, but you're with the president right now in the White House. You've got to think about what's going to be most effective in getting what you need, what you're trying to accomplish. Because this may not be your best strategy."

From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there's the political and the technical. I don't believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives.

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

Africans… their tired. They’re tired of being the subject of everybody’s charity and care. We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform.

The "third arrow" (of structural reform) is critically important. Japan has some of the best companies in the world, and if you look at their technology, their capability, it's extraordinary.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.

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

N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state

Unfortunately, the media, which are not at all reluctant to act in their own self-interest, have succeeded in equating reform in the public mind with further restrictions on just about everyone else's freedom of political speech.

I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.

Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow.

What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.

Though the two issues may seem utterly unrelated, they do have this in common - both health care and higher education are realms of American life in which government has undermined the operation of market forces and caused artificially high prices. These are two arenas in which the Democrats now propose to do exactly the wrong thing. Their reform reinforces old errors and will infinitely compound the problem of rising prices.

We should try to keep our mothers in the home and that's where the whole Reform platform hangs together.

A nation will rise no higher than the strength of its homes. If you want to reform a nation you begin with families.