Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.

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

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

I think I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.

Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself.

A reformer is a guy who rides through the sewer in a glass bottom boat.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.