Institutional Reform Quotes

The degree of civilization in a society can by judged by entering its prisons.

Politics is about making institutions work somewhat better, helping people’s lives at the margins

If we can’t sit at the table of democracy, then we’ll knock the fucking legs off. But before we tear it completely down, they will move to build a better one, rather than see this one destroyed.

Accountability goes hand in hand with reform.

To reason with goverments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected

You can't snap your fingers, and suddenly half of Congress is women.

The fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines.

Great institutions can only be reformed by stealth or by revolution.

We invite our friends who hold high positions in the legislative branch of government and state institutions to master the skills of administration, so they could, when the time comes, reform the Turkish state and make it more fruitful at all its levels in the name of Islam.

You cannot have viable economic development without democratization and vice versa.

Our choice of a reform framework dictated that we looked at the fundamental assumptions that had driven Nigeria's economy, society and policy hitherto and to seek ways of either abandoning or transcending those assumptions and their supporting institutions.

Over the years, the government launched more than one 'war on corruption,' and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up.

I think U.N. organizations are important organizations. They exist for good reasons. And we also admit that there is room for us to improve the way we do business. The WHO will be a very positive and proactive partner in the overall U.N. reform, which is also important.

It's certainly an interesting moment to try to talk about, 'cause you could make a great show about the police force right now, with all that's happening in the news and Ferguson and all of it.

The work to eradicate corruption must begin from the top. It is spread like termite in our country. We have to work at all levels to eradicate corruption

The kind of problems we're facing now, no government can fix.

I'm not taking power. I'm catalyzing systemic change.

If the State cannot survive the anti-slavery agitation, then let the State perish. If the Church must be cast down by the strugglings of Humanity to be free, then let the Church fall and its fragments be scattered to the four winds of Heaven, never more to curse the earth.

If there is an authoritarian structure at St. Hill it has been brought into being by the government itself. St. Hill is trying to correct itself. It doesn't know what it's trying to correct because nobody has told it what to correct.

Man is as the Lord made him. But we can change our institutions.

The progress of society depends on nothing more than the exposure of time-honored abuses.

In order for a president to be transformational, the old order has to fall as the orthodoxies that kept it in power exhaust themselves.

We cannot impose democracy where it has no constituency.

There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.

We started tearing down the seniority system on Capitol Hill. All of that begins in the '70s. It accelerates and continues in the '90s, and it's going on to this day.