Social Reformers Quotes

Established citizens—doctors, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, etc. will be recruited initially as “Social Crusaders.”

Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world.

Our world has always had two kinds of changers, the social changers and the money changers.

Take egoism out and you would castrate the benefactors. Luther, Mirabeau, Napoleon, John Adams; and our nearer eminent public servants,—[Horace] Greeley, Theodore Parker, [Henry] Ward Beecher, Horace Mann, [William Lloyd] Garrison would lose their vigour.

We learned about people like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and Marian Anderson. Harriet Tubman was my favorite.

Social reformers who wish to improve capitalism in order to more easily to preserve it oppose … this formidable diffusion of Marx's thought among the masses.

The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!

The ameliorating march of the last few centuries has been initiated by the heretics of each age, though I concede that the men and women denounced and persecuted as infidels by the pious of one century are frequently claimed as saints by the pious of a later generation.

The folks who go after grand challenges are impatient. They're pissed off. They're sick and tired, but in a passionate way. They're driven by a fire in their bellies to make a difference.