Social Reform Quotes

Eugenics is ... the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, 'social justice’.

Unless we make revolutionary reforms, some day — in some unknown serra — some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up in Brazil.

Victorian values…were the values when our country became great.

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.

The question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here. Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy. That is what we must do. But it is difficult and a complicated task to carry out in the present conditions of our economic life and in all the prevailing circumstances. There you have one aspect of the women’s problem which, after the seizure of power by the proletariat, looms large before us and demands a practical solution. It will give us a great deal of work here in Soviet Russia

One of the most difficult things is not to change society - but to change yourself.

That the caste system must be abolished if the Hindu society is to be reconstructed on the basis of equality, goes without saying. Untouchability has its roots in the caste system. They cannot expect the Brahmins to rise in revolt against the caste system. Also we cannot rely upon the non-Brahmins and ask them to fight our battle.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

The main targets of attack by the peasants are the local tyrants, the evil gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions, against the corrupt officials in the cities and against bad practices and customs in the rural areas. In force and momentum the attack is tempestuous; those who bow before it survive and those who resist perish. As a result, the privileges which the feudal landlords enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to pieces. Every bit of the dignity and prestige built up by the landlords is being swept into the dust.

It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.

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

Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

I believe in Spiritualism; I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the damnation by which men corrupt God's most holy institution of sexual relations.

We could beat back Kennedy on Civil Rights, but Lyndon [Johnson] knows how to beat us.

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils - no, nor the human race, as I believe - and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.

I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people's minds better than we Liberals.

True Americanism recognizes the enormous gravity of the social and labor problems which confront us.

I'm a Progressive. Much in the same way our founding fathers - who, oddly enough, wouldn't get elected today - were Progressives.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.

Centuries have elapsed since schools were first established.... Because learning was viewed as the exclusive province of the samurai and his superiors, farmers, artisans, merchants and women have neglected it altogether.... There shall, in the future, be no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person .... Hereafter ... every man shall, of his own accord, subordinate all other matters to the education of his children.

Father Coughlin has succeeded in persuading his hearers, or at least a large proportion of them, not only that his money theories and remedies are supported by the papal encyclicals, but that his economic teachings in general are on a level with the infallible pronouncements of the Church.

A single courageous state can if its citizen’s choose, serve as a laboratory…. One of the happy incidents of the federal system … novel social and economic experiments can be tried without risk to the rest of the country.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan [is] easily the most original thinker in the Senate.

Every generation of Americans writes its own Constitution.