Top 100 Quotes About Reformers
#1. The Bible became a jewel in the hands of the Reformers not because it was a "handbook for happy living" or a "primer of metaphysics about God," but because in it the Christian possessed the "the swaddling clothes in which Christ lies."85
Matthew Barrett
#2. In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.
Frank Herbert
#3. The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#4. No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
Gore Vidal
#5. There is a growing acceptance and interest in publicly funded school choice as a catalyst for education reform in general and a way to empower parents to be education reformers.
John T. Walton
#6. But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you - the social reformers - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
Isaiah Berlin
#7. Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#8. All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#9. To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers-- or both.
Elizabeth Charles
#10. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.
Henry David Thoreau
#12. I was trying to foment a little dissension.' He paused. 'No, that's too flippant. How about trying to make the system less warlike - injecting a little love?' He snorted. 'Through violence, of course, like all religious reformers.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#13. Unlike other reformers, Luther rarely claimed divine inspiration for his ideas. It is interesting too that he uses the word Kunst - art - for it suggests that the insight, like the skill of a craftsman or artist, opened up a whole new ability to accomplish things in a different way.
Lyndal Roper
#14. Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.
William Irwin Thompson
#15. Reformers who are obsessed with purity and cannot see that their obsession is impure.
E. M. Forster
#16. I'm now reading Tertullian, Cyprian, and others of the church fathers with great interest. In some ways they are more relevant to our time than the Reformers, and at the same time they provide a basis for talks between Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#17. Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils; not theological demons inspired by the evil one, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the unconscious.
Bertrand Russell
#18. Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.
Russell Kirk
#19. Everything has to be at once for six-month-old puppies, six-year-old children, and reformers of any age.
H. Beam Piper
#20. In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law.
Frederic Bastiat
#21. There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#22. To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler
#23. St. Francis was in some ways a fundamentalist, but he was fundamentalist about those passages that asked a lot of himself and his "form of life," whereas most reformers (and preachers) are fundamentalist about passages that ask a lot of
Hilarion Kistner O.F.M.
#24. The epoch of individuality is concluded, and it is the duty of reformers to initiate the epoch of association. Collective man is omnipotent upon the earth he treads.
Giuseppe Mazzini
#25. The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organization do not permit them to act.
Florence Nightingale
#26. Many modern (so-called) Reformers are just as dangerous as the physician who makes a wrong diagnosis of a disease. They see the trouble from without and prescribe external remedies, while the cause of the trouble is within and needs internal treatment.
William J.H. Boetcker
#27. Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.
Thomas Jefferson
#28. 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
#29. Now the sole remedy for the abuse of political power is to limit it; but when politics corrupt business, modern reformers invariably demand the enlargement of the political power.
Isabel Paterson
#30. Conceit is the devil's horse, and reformers generally ride it when they are in a hurry.
Margaret Deland
#31. We are reformers in the spring, but iin autumn we stand by the old. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ron Suskind
#32. Those who have heard or read anything from me on the subject, know that one of the principal points insisted on is, the forming of societies or any other artificial combinations IS the first, greatest, and most fatal mistake ever committed by legislators and by reformers.
Josiah Warren
#33. When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin preached, and Bellarmine lectured; but Machiavelli reigned.
Lord Acton
#34. The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.
Mother Jones
#35. It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.
Hector Hugh Munro
#36. When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.
Brian D. McLaren
#37. The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased.
Charles Hodge
#38. Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#39. Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.
Grant Morrison
#40. The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.
George Will
#41. The best reformers the world has ever seen
are those who commence on themselves.
George Bernard Shaw
#42. Some of the greatest social reformers of our time were wealthy.
Jerry Rubin
#43. Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.
Thomas Frank
#44. Feminism differs from reform of any kind, even franchise reform. Feminists, I should say, are not reformers at all, but ratherintellectual biologists and psychologists.
Rheta Childe Dorr
#45. We were good reformers, but we weren't good enough. We elected a candidate and then, busy with our own affairs, we left him hanging in mid-air. Reformers are such part-time pillars of society!
Margaret Case Harriman
#46. Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can't avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect.
Nina Easton
#47. We must help the reformers of the Middle East as they work for freedom, and strive to build a community of peaceful, democratic nations.
George W. Bush
#49. Public reformers had need first practice on their own hearts that which they purpose to try on others.
Charles I Of England
#51. We are the reformers. Reform ends if we leave, not just for us but also our friends in Europe who want our voice heard in Europe.
David Cameron
#52. According to the Reformers, each Christian has multiple vocations. We have callings in our work. We have callings in our families. We have callings as citizens in the larger society. And we have callings in the Church.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#53. It is often said by reformers that government should be conducted upon business principles.
John Buchanan Robinson
#54. The best of men are only men at their very best. Patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, - martyrs, fathers, reformers, puritans, - all are sinners, who need a Savior: holy, useful, honorable in their place - but sinners after all.
J.C. Ryle
#55. Indeed, while so much in education reform can divide activists into warring camps, expanding learning time unites reformers around a shared vision of bringing excellence and breadth to our nation's most impoverished and struggling schools.
Chris Gabrieli
#56. This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
Doris Lessing
#57. Those reformers who preach against image-worship, or what they denounce as idolatry - to them I say "Brothers, if you are fit to worship God-without-form discarding all external help, do so, but why do you condemn others who cannot do the same?"
Swami Vivekananda
#58. It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.
George Eliot
#59. [Reformers] might be classified as a distinct species having eyes in the back of their heads.
Ellen Glasgow
#60. We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. Societies accomplished important goals that still elude politicians, specialists in public policy, social reformers, and philanthropists. They successfully created vast social and mutual aid networks among the poor that are now almost entirely absent in many atomistic inner cities.
David T. Beito
#62. To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have men such as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler
#63. Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.
Richard Rohr
#64. It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.
Peter Medawar
#65. Reformers must remember always that religion shapes culture, and culture trumps politics.
Douglas Wilson
#66. A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains ...
Gertrude Atherton
#67. To divide life into areas of sacred and secular, letting our devotions take care of the former while becoming secular reformers during the week, is to fail to understand the true end of man
Henry R. Van Til
#68. Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. But it also got, along with other unanticipated by-products, the Thirty Years' War, capitalism and the first rudiments of modern Germany. If
Aldous Huxley
#69. It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.
William Graham Sumner
#70. 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
#71. Most ardent reformers are accompanied by but equal portion of dullness . John Quincy Adams
Paul C. Nagel
#72. To know how to say what other people only think, is what makes poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers.
Elizabeth Charles
#73. In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country's pre-second world war past.
Adam Michnik
#74. X, n. In our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language.
Ambrose Bierce
#75. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of women is responsible for prostitution.
Emma Goldman
#76. It is compromise that prevents each set of reformers from crushing the group at the other end of the political spectrum.
John F. Kennedy
#77. Most reformers, like a pair of trousers on a windy clothesline, go through a vast deal of vehement motion, but stay in the same place.
Austin O'Malley
#78. Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!
Honore De Balzac
#79. 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
#80. Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture-makers -- and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction,
Frederick Douglass
#81. It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.
John W. Gardner
#82. It was the fate of all reforms that they turned against the reformers.
Daniel Abraham
#83. There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.
Henry David Thoreau
#84. It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I.
Henry David Thoreau
#85. Should [reformers] attempt more than the established habits of the people are ripe for, they may lose all and retard indefinitely the ultimate object of their aim.
Thomas Jefferson
#86. And then," she continued, "there are all the subtle reformers who tell you the wild stories they've heard about you and how they've been sticking up for you.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#87. The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.
Walt Whitman
#88. Most reformers wore rubber boots and stood on glass when God sent a current of Commonsense through the Universe.
Elbert Hubbard
#89. As long as the opposition believes the world will stand with Ukraine's democrat reformers, they will have the leverage and the courage to establish a legitimate republic under the leadership of Viktor Yushchenko.
Bob Schaffer
#90. By using impossibly complicated language, school reformers create the impression that
Anonymous
#91. In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
Alfred Marshall
#92. Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can
immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms
and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.
George Packer
#93. Games of chance fell outside the boundaries of urban reformers' definitions of respectable labor and amusement
LaShawn Harris
#94. The second theological perspective that influenced many of the Reformers was the belief that the Great Commission passages already had been fulfilled during the lifetime of the apostles.
Timothy Tennent
#96. Lower oil prices won't, by themselves, topple the mullahs in Iran. But it's significant that, historically, when oil prices have been low, Iranian reformers have been ascendant and radicals relatively subdued, and vice versa when prices have been high.
James Surowiecki
#97. The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.
William Graham Sumner
#98. Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
Voltaire
#99. It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.
Edward Gibbon
#100. Power in the hands of the reformer is no less potentially corrupting than in the hands of the oppressor.
Derrick A. Bell
