Michel Winock Quotes

Fighting poverty is nothing new for the Conservative Party, but during the 1980s the emphasis placed on individualism and prosperity was sometimes seen to crowd out social issues like helping the most vulnerable in society.

We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and even if change is desirable, we won’t accept change overnight.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

The use of power to bring about radical social and political change in the 1860s carries important implications for the use of federal power to bring about change in matters of race, citizenship, and social welfare today. So long as this remains true—and there us no sign that these issues will go away any time soon.

Since the war [WWII], the world has been rushing forward at an unprecedented and exhilarating speed … Yet Britain lags behind, lacking the will or the plan which can bring this future within the reach of us all.

The lesson of the past 100 years is that as the United States grows wealthier, Americans become willing to spend more to insure risk and enhance fairness. Advances in social policy come only intermittently but they do come. And when they come, they usually last.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

Poverty should not just be made an issue - there is need to actually work on it.

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

It's more important to try to do something for the crores of poor people of my country.

If someone believes that living on benefits is a lifestyle choice, then we need to make them think again.

Governments allocate enormous resources for social programs. And it is true that for many years we have had one of the best social service systems in the world. Yet we are still incapable of meeting the needs of tens of thousands of Canadian families.

After years of piecemeal reform the current welfare system is complex and unfair.

Co-opting the conservative line on anti-poverty programs did nothing to halt conservative attacks on anti-poverty programs.

I was once a welfare recipient and am very aware of the successes and failures of this critical safety net. There are those that would have us believe that those receiving TANF benefits are lazy, shiftless, freeloaders who are just sitting around thinking of another way to suckle from the government teat.

We need fundamental change. In the past, national development led to people's happiness but now the link between national growth and improvement in people's lives has been severed.

The worst thing we could do is impose time limits and then expect people to sink or swim once they move off welfare.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

Attacking poverty is very expensive, and means doing things politically that are either impossible or very difficult to bring off.

The French social model is no longer the best one in the world. We have massive unemployment. It must change.

Everything changes.... Social life changes, and with it the "national question" changes, too. At different periods different classes enter the arena, and each class has its own view of the "national question." Consequently, in different periods the "national question" serves different interests and assumes different shades, according to which class raises it, and when.

Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

Making these changes is a matter of life and death for our country, and it will give our people a chance to lead a better life.

I didn't have any personal goals when I came, but after being in politics - after seeing people, their difficulties, their wants - I think our goal has to be to eliminate poverty from India.