Quotes About Reform

I'm not optimistic about reform in many, if any, policy areas at all. I think we'll make further progress by inventing new things that aren't much regulated yet and outracing bad policy. I look at so many policy areas - regulation, regulatory reform, health care reform - it's all failing, we're not making improvements, we're going backwards.

The church is always trying to get other people to reform, it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example

The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. ... [T]he long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior.

It is what makes the reform process an art, not just a science. You have to develop a strategy that tells you what reform measures you should follow and in what sequence.

Self-reform automatically brings about social reform.

I balanced the budget for four straight years, paid off $405 billion in debt - pretty conservative. The first entitlement reform of your lifetime - in fact, the only major entitlement reform now is welfare.

Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President's economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation - innovation begins in the classroom - clean energy and climate, addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may say, is health care, health insurance 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.

Pension reform can be hard to talk about. In the long run, reform now means fewer demands for layoffs and less draconian measures in the future. It's in the best interest of all Californians to fix this system now.

On the most recent battles on health insurance reform, the women led the battle to end gender discrimination by the insurance companies [where] women paid more and got less of a benefit, and also the whole issue of prevention.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

I didn't become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It's not the be all and end all for us. There are other very, very key ambitions in politics, not least social mobility and life chances, that I care about as passionately if not more.

Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that's got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes; then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!

There are three major political organizations in this country: the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and the Koch Brothers Party. With billions to spend on campaigns. think tanks and 'educational' organizations, the Koch brothers are the most powerful. We must overturn Citizens United, move to public funding of elections and pass real tax reform.

I admired the way McCain worked on campaign finance reform. I admired the way Nancy Pelosi stiffened the Democrats' spine during the health care debate. I admire the way Barack Obama has raised a dog in the White House without ever putting it on the roof of the car for a vacation drive.

There have been waves of reform in the past. I see no reason why they wouldn't happen again.

We must have sweeping, generous immigration reform, make existing law- abiding Hispanics welcome. Most are hard working family people.

I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.

The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us.

People expect those in authority to take on big problems and to solve them. We had an opportunity to reform Social Security in a way that would have protected people's benefits and created a solvent system. Younger workers would be confident that the money they were putting into the system would be available to them when they retired. It was a missed opportunity. I regret that.

We absolutely need to reform the Congressional budget-writing process.

America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.

It would be a great reform in politics if perception could be made to spread as easily and as rapidly as foolishness.

By eliminating the tax breaks and special interest loopholes that primarily benefit the wealthy, our framework ensures that the benefits of tax reform go to the middle class, not the highest earners.

When the president talks about tax reform, he talks about the people who will benefit. He talks about American jobs. He talks about the fact that we're going to be taking money that's overseas and bringing it back to the United States so that it will employ American workers. I think that focus again on the American working and middle class is- is-is to me the most thoughtful and, in some ways, the most genius part of Trump's approach to politics.

If there were two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican, who each committed to the same kind of fundamental reform, then the election would be an election between the vice presidential candidates. It'd be just like the regular election, except it would be one step down.

Fiscal responsibility and government reform are going to be good themes for governing, well at any time, but particularly coming out of a recovery.

The World Trade Organization, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of 'reform'.

I think there's bipartisan support in the Senate to pass a good reform bill.

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."

If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. This will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reform and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is inevitable.

I have fought against spending. I have fought against special interests. I have fought for reform.

Barak Obama said as much today talking about immigration. (imitating Obama) "I don't care what happens today. It is gonna happen. We are going to have comprehensive immigration reform. We're gonna have amnesty for these 11 or 12 million. It's gonna happen. You just wait." And that's the way they go about it. Defeat is not something that, in their minds, is lasting.

Even if we didn't have a single person in the USA in violation of immigration laws, we'd still have to do immigration reform, because our legal immigration system is broken. It's not good for anybody.

The future of the Republican Party, all the different folks looking to lead the Republican Party at the national level in the future, recognize we should do immigration reform.

For a long time I was ashamed of the way I lived. Did I reform, you ask? No. I'm not ashamed anymore.

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

I can guarantee you this, that more pension and benefit reforms which I will consider arbitration reform to be one of them, are things that when they come to my desk, they will be signed.

The AMA puts the lives and well being of the American citizens well below it's own special interest...It deserves to be ignored, rejected, and forgotten. No amount of historical gymnastics can hide the public record of AMA opposition to virtually every major health reform in the past 50 years....The AMA has turned into a propaganda organ purveying 'medical politics' for deceiving the Congress, the people, and the doctors of America themselves.

The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform.

Liberia has to take primary responsibility for its own reform agenda. But our resources are limited. We have to attract the private sector to get jobs to our people that will enable us to raise the government revenue, but to do that we have to build infrastructure. It's a very complex problem of development we are facing here.

We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.

On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.

In government, I'm a strong believer in the need for reform of government agencies and departments. They - they have gotten fat and sloppy, and they're not user friendly. They are inefficient. They cost too much.

Ending police brutality and mass incarceration. There is a growing left-right support for criminal justice reform.