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.

Don't marry a man to reform him - that's what reform schools are for.

If we are going to solve the challenges we face, you need a President who will pursue genuine solutions day in and day out. And that is my commitment to you. We need immigration reform that will secure our borders, and punish employers who exploit immigrant labor; reform that finally brings the 12 million people who are here illegally out of the shadows by requiring them to take steps to become legal citizens. We must assert our values and reconcile our principles as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. That is a priority I will pursue from my very first day.

They'll [China] probably be a fully developed nation. The road there just is not going to be that easy. You're going from a macromanaged, top-down economy to a market-managed, micromanaged type of economy, with all the potential corruption issues, SOE [state-owned enterprise] reform, and market reform that come with it.

The interests of the United States are better served by demanding reform and seeing that reform takes place than by removing our influence from the U.N.

Even if you're trying to remain objective, even if you're trying not to mount any campaigns or endorse anything, when you cover an issue you are at least encouraging people to think about all the possibilities and if you're not covering political reform, electoral reform, you can write stories about them that don't say we must do this but just educate people on the fact that there are various advocates who are tugging us in that direction, that can present the arguments of those advocates, and I do think that's an issue we for some reason completely turned away from.

Obama's Democrats have become the part of no. Real cuts to federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no.

I came to the conclusion months ago, and I said it to members of Congress, that the only way people are going to fully appreciate what this reform is if we pass it and implement it and it becomes not a caricature but a reality, and I still believe that. So I think it will be easier to sell it moving forward than it was to this point.

Internal reform in Russia would require a better relationship with the West.

I think it's a pity that in many people's minds constitutional reform and PR have come to mean much the same thing.

The political elite in Russia don't want domestic reform, they aren't ready for it. As such, they welcome an external threat. You have to remember that Russia rests on two national concepts: defense and sovereignty. We approach the question of security much more reverentially than other countries do.

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 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.

We will proceed with current land reform with or without sanctions, ... Let that position be known here and abroad and let the commercial farmers tell that to their constituency or constituencies overseas.

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.

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.

Students being miseducated, criminalized and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in prison-type schools provide a grim reminder of the degree to which the ethos of containment and punishment now creeps into spheres of everyday life that were largely immune in the past from this type of state violence. This is not merely barbarism parading as reform - it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing itself.

there can be neither politically nor morally a good which is not universal ... we cannot reform for a time or for a class, but for all and for the whole, and our very interests will draw us together in one wide bond of sympathy.

Only reform and opening up can develop China. We must not be afraid of any risks, and not be confused by any distractions.

If you can get conservatives to sit down for 20 minutes and listen to you on drug policy reform you might have a good chance to - if not convert them - at least respect your opinion.

This formidable censor of the public functionaries [the press], by arraigning them at the tribunal of public opinion, produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by revolution. It is also the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man and improving him as a rational, moral, and social being.

Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of non­resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self­suffering.

The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting - and careerism.

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.

All that is deformed ought to be reformed. The Word of God alone teaches us what ought to be so, and all reform effected otherwise is vain.

History shows that there is no more potent engine for reform than the passion of voters who feel betrayed by the politicians they hoped would do the right thing.

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.

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

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.

The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.

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.

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

There is a cultural norm on the left of being afraid to declare victory, which is related to the binary of reform/revolution. Whereas reformists are winning small gains, revolutionaries don't want people to be satisfied with those small victories because they worry this will lead to acceptance of the bigger picture of capitalism domination, and so they find a way to turn every victory into a defeat. In the book, I call for a culture of declaring victory wherever we can.

Before we even consider expanding Medicare, or another program based on its rates, we must reform our Medicare payment system so that it rewards value, not volume, and doesn't disadvantage states like Minnesota that provide high-quality care in an efficient way.

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.

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

I think in 2012 one of the primary issues that will get a lot of discussion will be comprehensive tax reform.

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.

There is a great reform required in the education and habits of females.

Of course, the genesis of a good portion of the gridlock in Congress does not reside in Congress itself. Ultimate reform will require each of us, as voters and Americans, to take a long look in the mirror, because in many ways, our representatives in Washington reflect the people who have sent them there.

From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

History's lesson is to make the most of reform opportunities when they arise because they do not arise often and they do not last long.

Keep to the ancient way and custom of the Church, established and confirmed by so many Saints under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And live a new life. Pray, and get others to pray, that God not abandon His Church, but reform it as He pleases, and as He sees best for us, and more to His honor and glory.

We need to reform our school lunch programs. We need to get healthy items into the vending machines.

If you want to really sort of quantify the dereliction of the Republican establishment, those two facts are the most important two facts. One, that they didn`t even understand the base of their own party, white working class voters who you know what, don`t care about tax cuts for the rich, really aren`t interested in the things that the elite part of their party want, including immigration reform. And number two, they spent eight months avoiding finding opposition research to use against the guy who was becoming the front-runner in their party that they don`t want.

Most Republicans are not prepared to stand up to the fossil fuel industry because they get a lot of their campaign funds from the Koch brothers and other people in the fossil fuel industry. That tells me why we have to reform our campaign finance system.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.