Hanan Ashrawi Quotes

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

Reformation must begin with the GREAT, or it will never be effectual. Their example is the fountain whence the vulgar draw their habits, actions, and characters. To expect to reform the poor while the opulent are corrupt, is to throw odors into the stream while the springs are poisoned.

There is complete disdain for all that exists .... History, society, and the economics of present institutions are all minor issues in choosing a reform program ...

Accountability goes hand in hand with reform.

Your not going to change the hearts and minds. You have to change to law.

If society is to be responsive to human needs, a vast restructuring of our laws is essential ... A vast restructuring of our society is needed if remedies are to become available to the average person.

Courts should ... follow, rather than lead, changes taking place elsewhere in society.

We … need education in the obvious – to learn to transcend our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly change of law.

Great institutions can only be reformed by stealth or by revolution.

Great economic and social forces flow with a tidal sweep over communities that are only half conscious of them. Wise statesmen are those who foresee what time is thus bringing, and endeavor to shape institutions and to mold men's thought and purpose in accordance with the change that is silently surrounding them.

We must liberate our concepts of justice, our laws and legal institutions from the bonds which hold a tight grip on us although they are incompatible with the needs of our century.

Not any Palestine man or Egypt man feels that Jews who come from the outside have the right to stay in Palestine. At the same time, the Palestinian people on the outside cannot have a grave to bury in. This is not religion.

All great reforms go together.

Most governments and people want reform. It’s the prospect of change that makes reform rare.

Every problem we have in this country we created and we can fix it.

Successful reform requires a long-term vision, driven by political leadership.

In order to make the changes work, the majority of members of society that has entered into the changes must wake up every morning with a feeling of the great historical moment, with the feeling of something big and extraordinary.

Omri, king of Israel, has oppressed Moab many days…. His son succeeded him and he too said, “I will oppress Moab”.

You can’t fix the things that bother you the most by passing a law.

You have to get an individual who's willing to actually struggle with the system to change it. As long as you have people who - to make substantive changes, to make infrastructure changes.

People of all races need to come together to control our government and run a giant comb through it so we can see the filth that comes out.

I am mindful that the goal of protest is not more protest, but the goal of protest is change.

What we have got to do now is use this event, the resignation of the whole commission, to drive through root and branch reform.

To punish the individual for the sins of the system makes no sense. We're responsible for changing it, yes. But we can't actually invent another universe, so we have to start where we are.

'Revolution' does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife nor is there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol. By 'Revolution' we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change.