#reformer

He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist.It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must ne found either in action, of some immensely solid kind,on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. ↗

— Henry James

#grand-designs #purpose-of-life #reformer #art

Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated-- but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer. ↗

— B.F. Skinner

#politics #science #design

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road. ↗

— Voltaire

#disregard #ignorance #innovation #persecution #reformers

A reformer knows neither how to do nor to undo. ↗

— Jose Bergamin

#knows #neither #nor #reformer #undo

A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat. ↗

— Lydia M. Child

#defeat #forth #reformer #sets #sure

Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos. ↗

— William Irwin Thompson

#because #chaos #dangerous #hysterical #idealism

Those who have heard or read anything from me on the subject, know that one of the principal points insisted on is, the forming of societies or any other artificial combinations IS the first, greatest, and most fatal mistake ever committed by legislators and by reformers. ↗

— Josiah Warren

#anything #artificial #combinations #committed #ever

The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased. ↗

— Charles Hodge

#bondage #church #delivering #did #every

If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank. ↗

— William Dean Howells

#crank #dream #him #his #like

Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them. ↗

— Thomas Frank

#concerns #debate #democrats #elected #fundamental