Resistance to Reform Quotes

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

England is a slow moving country, reluctant to change—deeply reluctant to change.

It is not much to be wondered at if impatient or disappointed reformers, groaning under the impediments opposed to the most salutary public improvements by the ignorance, the indifference, the intractableness, the perverse obstinacy of a people, and the corrupt combinations of selfish private interests armed with the powerful weapons afforded by free institutions, should at times sigh for a strong hand to bear down all these obstacles, and compel a recalcitrant people to be better governed.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

You've tried to reform what will not learn. Shut doors on traits that you wish were dead; They will open a window and return.

There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general mind under which we must acquiesce. A forty years' experience of popular assemblies has taught me that you must give them time for every step you take. If too hard pushed, they balk, and the machine retrogrades.

Almost every witness that has been before this committee has opposed that reform which would affect his own industry.

For more than a hundred years much complaint has been made of the unmethodical way in which schools are conducted, but it is only within the last thirty that any serious attempt has been made to find a remedy for this state of things. And with what result? Schools remain exactly as they were.

Inertia is a powerful force in human and political affairs.

I've decided that the political context is such that the only way reform will finally come about in the Russian military is that the deterioration goes beyond the point to which these old generals can stand up there and resist it.

We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.

In almost all city governments in America, the small group of people who don't want change are able to block change.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

What brought Conservatism into existence was the French Revolution.

Vote against anything introduced with a "re" in it, especially reforms, reorganizations, and recodifications. This usually means going back to something that failed once and is likely to do so again.

Major flaw in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.

Inertia is the most powerful force in politics.

The most conservative man in the world is the British Trade Unionist when you want to change him.

Repressive regimes do not endure change willingly - and Venezuela is no exception.

Keep yourselves to what is old, for that is good; our ancestors have proved it to be good; why should not we do as they did? New ideas [i.e. democracy, parliamentary reform] are now coming forward of which I do not nor ever shall approve. Mistrust these ideas and keep to the positive.

Entrenched bureaucracies are always opposed to fundamental changes.