Social Reform Quotes

• Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Strong Women, Inspiration, People

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• What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights.

  B. R. Ambedkar

  Rights, Order, Liberty

  85 Copy quote

• Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

  Rebecca West

  Men, Civilization, Reform

  Rebecca West (2010). “The New Meaning of Treason”, p.182, Open Road Media

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• At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.

  Rodney Dangerfield

  Time, Fighting, Men

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• Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong; but always by the strength of the weak.

  Karl Marx

  Strong, Weakness, Reform

  Karl Marx (1976). “Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Marx and Engels: 1845-48”

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• 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.

  Henry George

  Party, Ideas, Progress

  Henry George (2006). “Social Problems”, p.242, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Reform, World, Women's Suffrage

  Lynn Sherr, Susan B. Anthony (1995). “Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words”, Crown

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• Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

  Samuel Smiles

  Evil, Political, Reform

  "Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic". Book by Timothy Travers, 1987.

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• Self-reform automatically brings about social reform.

  Ramana Maharshi

  Self, Reform, Social

  Ramana (Maharshi.), Paul Brunton, Mungala Venkataramiah (1984). “Conscious Immortality: Conversations with Ramana Maharshi”

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• Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

  Karl Kraus

  Cancer, Decision, Suffering

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom is the very height of ignorance and futility.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Educational, Ignorance, Race

  Sri Aurobindo Mandir, Calcutta, Aurobindo Ghose (1947). “Annual”

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• My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road; in politics as well as in social reform I had been for "the best possible." But now I was pushed far toward the left on the subject of the war and I became gradually convinced that in order to make the position of the pacifist clear it was perhaps necessary that at least a small number of us should be forced into an unequivocal position.

  Jane Addams

  War, Small Numbers, Order

  Jane Addams, Jean Bethke Elshtain (2002). “The Jane Addams Reader”, p.317, Basic Books

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• The best social reform program in the world is a job.

  Ronald Reagan

  Jobs, Reform, World

  16 Copy quote

• The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Struggle, Government, Survival

  Martin Luther King (Jr.), Michael K. Honey (2011). “All Labor Has Dignity”, p.101, Beacon Press

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• Religion and religion alone is the life of India, and when that goes India will die, in spite of politics, in spite of social reforms, in spite of Kubera's wealth poured upon the head of every one of her children.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Children, India, Wealth

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1073, Manonmani Publishers

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• for me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform.

  Vivian Gornick

  Self, Political, Feminism

  Vivian Gornick (1978). “Essays in feminism”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.

  Michael Parenti

  Struggle, Rights, Political

  "Democracy for the Few". Book by Michael Parenti, 1974.

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• On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Spiritual, Atheist, Real

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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• Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

  Carl Bernstein

  Political, Reform, Movement

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• Each nation has its own peculiar method of work. Some work through politics, some through social reforms, some through other lines. With us, religion is the only ground along which we can move.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Moving, Reform, Peculiar

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1222, Manonmani Publishers

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• Actually, the New Deal's central dedication was to business recovery rather than social reform.

  Michael Parenti

  Recovery, Dedication, Political

  "Democracy for the Few". Book by Michael Parenti, 1974.

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• 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.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Struggle, Character, Loss

  "The Russian Revolution, and Leninism Or Marxism?".

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• Until politics are a branch of science, we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Cutting, Political, Branches

  John B. S. Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1945). “Possible Worlds”, p.23, Transaction Publishers

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• Of course, no-one thinks the EU is perfect. In recent years, the pace of social reform has slowed. But staying in offers the chance to rebuild a vision of Europe for workers, regardless of the passport they hold.

  Frances O'Grady

  Thinking, Years, Europe

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• A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

  Anatole France

  Military, War, Patriotic

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