reform quotes

Anna Quindlen: 

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Florynce Kennedy: 

Don't agonize. Organize.

Frederick Douglass: 

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

James Walker: 

A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

Jawaharial Nehru: 

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it You just do it one step at a time.

Michael Harrington: 

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

Susan B. Anthony: 

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, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

Susan B. Anthony: 

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