Reform Failure Quotes

I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.

If immigration reform doesn't happen, that doesn't say good things about our democracy, that everybody wants it, but Congress couldn't pass it.

Gorbachev was acutely aware of the [USSR] economic problems, and it was central to all he did. He wanted to change the system in hopes of saving it. In the end he could not.

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

I have been Europe's last hope. She proved incapable of refashioning herself by means of voluntary reform. She showed herself impervious to charm and persuasion. To take her I had to use violence. (26th February)

POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.

Year after year we do not get reform as a result of scandals; we simply get more scandals.

Child psychology and child psychiatry cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

For many years we have spent a great deal of effort and money on school reform. Yet where are we today?

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

The defeat of Obamacare will come from the realization that the very idea of a government-administered health care system is absurd... and by people opting out of the system and developing workarounds.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

[New York reformers] tried to stand so straight that they fell over backwards.

The failure of both Congress and state legislatures to respond to the murder of George Floyd with any meaningful action reminds us that our nation's attempts at reform can often amount to nothing.

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.

Obamacare is terminal. It is going to fail under the crushing weight of its own flawed design.

Not a single reform effort in Russia has ever been completed.

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

I have never seen the author of a reform bill who was able to predict accurately what would really happen when the bill was passed.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the Jimmy Carter of the Communist bloc. The Russians hate him.

People do not want to be disillusioned by the new president [Barak Obama]. The liberals felt, finally, this is our time. Now they're worried. Now what they see is more business as usual. We all want to give him the benefit of the doubt, we know it's a tough job and he inherited a mess, but at the end of the day, is it really change we can believe in when there's no public options and Wall Street reform has no teeth in it? It really looks a lot like we just changed the color.

All the efforts of Lafayette, Kosciuszko and Garibaldi, and all the faith of Mazzini, Mickiewicz and Michelet, were defeated by the fundamental truth that the people they sought to liberate and make happy were simply not interested.

I kept trying, proposing, pushing... If you want to succeed, you cannot leave work half done, and unfortunately, many things were left half done. The choice was made not to launch a second wave of economic reforms that I was proposing.