George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Self-reform automatically brings about social reform.

The ultimate solution is not in the hands of the government. The solution falls on each and every individual, with guidance from family, friends and community. The #1 responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow. This is of greater importance than working on changing the government; that is secondary to promoting a virtuous society. If we can achieve this, then the government will change.

Anybody who tries to change society without examining the family is trying to push a shadow without moving a statue.

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

It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.

Alfred Nobel believed that social changes are brought about slowly, and sometimes by indirect means.

Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.

Societies either roll on blindly to disaster or they find the inner strength to stop themselves long enough to find ways for reform from within.

Too often reform involves the mechanics of change rather than the underlying values.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

In this situation [perestroika] problems and difficulties are unavoidable. For it involves far-reaching changes in everything—in the way of life, the attitude toward work and civic duty. We have chosen, definitively and irrevocably, the route leading to new forms of life: democratizing our society in all spheres.

We are making our revolution slowly and by constitutional methods.

Human society cannot, be changed in a year.

Your honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government; that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means....

All great reforms go together.

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

The period of radical reform is finished.

The American people are not inclined to change their society in order to free the Negro. They are ready to undertake some, and perhaps major reforms, but not to make a revolution.

Americans never would alter the way entitlement programs are funded or education administered without serious study and widespread debate.

change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom.

You gotta make a change. Its time for us as a people to start making some changes, lets change the way we eat, lets change the way we live, and lets change the way we treat each other. You see the old way wasn't working so its on us, to do what we gotta do to survive.

It is not enough to criticize society without offering a workable alternative.

Unless there's a personal transformation, there can be no social transformation.

In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.