John Hutton Quotes

A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much...

We believe that a society in turmoil cannot be saved through mere legislation.

Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed

When capitalism changes, so must socialism.

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.

France has to accelerate in terms of reform.

Government is on a collision course with the future

Executing the massive transformation they [the Chinese reform leaders] envision will take most of their political capital and will require firm political control, even as the reforms generate strong forces for social and political change.

In the past Russia needed liberty to live better. It must now have it in order to survive…. The challenge of our times is an overhaul of the system of values, the forging of a new consciousness. We cannot build a new country with old thinking …

Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard.

America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of its exhausted ideas.

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system. -- With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression. To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature [us] will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

Jacksonianism [populism] is always an important force in American politics; at times of social and economic stress and change … its importance tends to grow.

There is always room for understanding towards those who see the old ways crumbling. And today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it does, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders too.

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.

We demand that, in the strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and new relations, that in this new world we also have our share of honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Women. We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. That is our ‘Woman’s Right’.

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

We, the people of the United States, and nobody else, must cure whatever is wrong with the industrial situation, typified by this narrative of the Standard Oil Company.

The duty of an American churchman in China is not simply introducing new ideas into the country, but modifying its industrial, social, and political life and institutions. Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.

We've got to get everything we want—a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything—now or never.

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

The American economy must be altered to put business back in the driver's seat. The correct role for finance is to support job creation.

Our system of market capitalism wasn't handed down, in perfect form, on stone tablets. We wrote the rules. We broke them. And we can fix them.