"Reform" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... burnt brandy; three things much against the stomach." In 1768, eighteen votes were polled for one candidate and sixteen for his rival. One of the tenants, in a cottage valued at about three shillings a week, refused L1000 for his vote. Bramber remained a pocket borough until the Reform Bill. William Wilberforce, the abolitionist, sat for it for some years; there is a story that on passing one day through the village he stopped his carriage to inquire the name. "Bramber? Why, that's the place I'm ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... undertakes the cleansing of a careless bachelor's apartment will be liable to more abuse for the dust she raises than commendation for the clearance she effects. Let it not be imagined, however, that I consider myself competent to reform the errors and abuses of society, but only that I would fain contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim; and if I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... 1244 (see p. 195). Henry's misgovernment, in fact, had roused all classes against him, as the townsmen and the smaller landowners had been even worse treated than the greater barons. In 1257 one obstacle to reform was removed. Richard of Cornwall, the king's brother, who was formidable through his wealth and the numbers of his vassals, had for some time taken part against them. In 1257 he was chosen king of the Romans by the German electors, ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... affairs Gluck found his new sphere of labor—Gluck, himself overflowing with the revolutionary spirit, full of the enthusiasm of reform. At first he carried everything before him. Protected by royalty, he produced, on the basis of an admirable libretto by Du Rollet, one of the great wits of the time, "Iphigenia in Aulis." It was enthusiastically received. The critics, delighted to establish ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... man! But, before God, I repeat to you, I am innocent of my father's blood! For the last time I repeat, it wasn't I killed him! I was erring, but I loved what is good. Every instant I strove to reform, but I lived like a wild beast. I thank the prosecutor, he told me many things about myself that I did not know; but it's not true that I killed my father, the prosecutor is mistaken. I thank my counsel, too. I cried listening to him; but ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... pursuers caused the enemy to fire high to avoid killing their own men. In fact, on that occasion the Union soldier nearest the enemy was in the safest position. Without awaiting further orders or stopping to reform, on our troops went to the second line of works; over that and on for the crest—thus effectually carrying out my orders of the 18th for the battle and of the 24th ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... direction of correctness of costume, but they had been regarded as rather dangerous innovations. Garrick candidly confessed himself timid about the matter. Benjamin West once inquired of the actor why he did not reform the costume of the stage. "The audience would not stand it," said Garrick; "they would throw a bottle at my head if I attempted any alteration." The truth was, perhaps, that Garrick had won his triumphs ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... leave and licence to put an end to its life in a painless manner. To what enormities and dastardly agreements this might lead need hardly be suggested; and I am quite confident that the members of the honourable profession of physic, to which I am proud to belong, have no desire whatever for such a reform of the law or of their ethics. Then we are told in the same address (Bateson, British Association Addresses in Australia, 1914) that on the whole a decline in the birth-rate is rather a good thing, and that ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... oil prices brought a 2% drop in GNP in 1988. GNP probably rose slightly in 1989, considerably short of the 3.4% population growth rate in 1989. Heating oil and gasoline are rationed. Agriculture has suffered from the war, land reform, and shortages of equipment and materials. The five-year plan seeks to reinvigorate the economy by increasing the role of the private sector, boosting nonoil income, and securing foreign loans. The plan is overly ambitious but probably ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... be sorry to have any of these exercises abandoned. While some of them demand reform, they are all, on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... and the men adjured to rally about them. Fiery, eloquent, of French descent and impassioned, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard rose in his stirrups and talked of la gloire, of home, and of country. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana listened, cheered, and began to reform. Johnston, Scotch, correct, military, the Regular in person, trusted to the hilt by the men he led, seized the colours of the 4th Alabama, raised them above his grey head, spurred his war horse, and in the hail of shot and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... who felt an interest in scientific or economic problems; for it was hoped that in this manner the new ideas might imperceptibly permeate the class whose privileges and traditions presented the chief obstacle to reform. In France, it was whispered, free-thinkers and political agitators were the honoured guests of the nobility, who eagerly embraced their theories and applied them to the remedy of social abuses. Only by similar means could the ideals ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... direction. One arose from the circumstances of the day. Bentham, originally a man of somewhat conservative temper, was driven into Radicalism comparatively late in life by the indifference or hostility of the governing classes to his schemes of reform. Government, as he saw it, was of the nature of a close corporation with a vested interest hostile to the public weal, and his work is penetrated by distrust of power as such. There was much in the history of the time to justify his attitude. It was difficult at that time to believe in an honest ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... longer than it was obliged to by law. By disregarding law, he wished to know whether the laws would not be greater than the profits. He admitted that this was a pun; but appealed to PUNCHINELLO upon the point of the propriety of puns. Reform, he would say, was a "plant" of slow growth. He had sown it; and his colleague, Mr. ——-, had watered it; but it did not seem to thrive ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... does not play them false, even though conditions in many places are better now than in the intermediate past, after modern times had settled in, but before INCOPOT and the Soil Conservation Service and such influences had begun to push for reform of the casual, anciently human ways of doing things in which present human populations can no longer afford to indulge themselves. Some of the gains that have been made are being cancelled out by growth and new types of pollution, however, and ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... shaping the policy of his colony, and forthwith proclaimed such a government as existed nowhere else on earth. Absolute freedom of conscience was guaranteed to everyone; it was declared that governments exist for the sake of the governed, that to reform a criminal is more important than to punish him, that the death penalty should be inflicted only for murder or high treason, and that every man had a right to vote and to hold office. All of which are such matters of course to-day that ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... footing of his own. He blossomed out in perpetual previous engagements whenever he was asked to dine; but he had made a bargain with Majendie by which he claimed unlimited opportunity for seeing Edie as the price of his promise to reform. This time Majendie was obliged to intimate to him that his reform must be regarded as the ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... time to try to reform your brother this morning. Be a good boy, Andy. Mind Jerry. Don't let your little brother ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... freely of the sinner and to the sinner; warning him of his danger and pointing him to his impenitent doom. But it is to be understood that he never spoke evil to injure any one. Whatever he said in that way was to reform and to bless. His heart ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their duty to us; for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others will, I am afraid, be too apt to build upon it. You say, however, you have seen your errors, and will reform them. I firmly believe you, my dear child; and therefore, from this moment, you shall never be reminded of them by me. Remember them only yourself so far as for the future to teach you the better to avoid them; but still remember, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... action and taste throughout the social system, there is also perceptible a solid foundation of good-sense and an earnest desire for improvement, which gradually, as the century wore on, introduced one reform after another, until many of those benefits were attained or made possible which the present century almost unconsciously enjoys. We should lose one of the most instructive lessons which history can afford, if, with Carlyle, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... nation that fully develops the policy which pervaded the records of the English Commonwealth will be the leader of the world. The suppression of those records has not suppressed the spirit of popular liberty, or the progress of mankind in the path of reform, freedom, equal rights, and a true civilization. It has only cast a shadow, which can never wholly be dispelled, over what otherwise would have been the brightest page in the annals of a great people. We depend for our knowledge ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... to their hurt by that which affords them so much delight. For neither did Lycurgus, the valiant son of Dryas (as Homer calls him) ("Iliad," vi. 130.) act like a man of sound reason in the course which he took to reform his people that were much inclined to drunkenness, by travelling up and down to destroy all the vines in the country; whereas he should have ordered that every vine should have a well of water near it, that (as Plato saith) the drunken deity might be reduced to temperance ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... is difficult to believe that, which will make us wretched. But I will not sooth you by flattering and false hopes. We all know how fascinating the vice of gaming is, and how difficult it is, also, to conquer habits; the Chevalier might, perhaps, reform for a while, but he would soon relapse into dissipation—for I fear, not only the bonds of habit would be powerful, but that his morals are corrupted. And—why should I conceal from you, that play is not his only vice? he appears to have a ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... man waved them down wearily. 'Who but the P.N.D.'s are the synthesis of the historic necessities? We subsume the Conservative elements of the Spojnia Narodowa National League and of the Party of Real Politics with the Reform elements of the Democratic League ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... portrait of himself, which Sir Joshua presented to his native town of Plympton as his substitute, having been elected mayor of the town—an honour that was according to the expectation of the electors thus repaid. The Municipal Reform brought into office in the town of Plympton, as elsewhere, a set of men who neither valued art nor the fame of their eminent townsman. Men who would convert the very mace of office into cash, could not be expected to keep a portrait; so it was sold by auction, and for a mere trifle. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... will win you, and we will go far away from the scenes that know me but too well, where a reward is offered for my capture, and where prison doors yawn to receive me. I will marry you, and then I will reform—I will do anything you ask of me; but I must, I will have your love, or I—will—kill—you! I could never bear to see you the bride ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... issue of faiths the Crussols divided. The head of the house was for the Pope and the King; the two cadets were for God and the Reform. Then it was that the castle (according to an over-sanguine chronicler of the period) was "transformed into an unconquerable stronghold"; and thereafter—always for the advancement of Christianity of one sort or another—a liberal amount of killing went on beneath its walls. In the end, disregarding ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... was there not much in her that he must subdue, reform, if they were really to spend their lives together? Her energy of domination perhaps excelled his. Such a woman might be unable to concede him the liberty in marriage which theoretically she granted to be just. Perhaps ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... lull after the late Reform agitation is very natural. There are four parties waiting each other's moves; three, at least, exclusive of Bright's, which is the least. There are the present Government, the late Government, and the country—which, ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon it in her sinful wars of conquest, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... General placed an ambulance-cart at her disposal, with an escort, from whom she received every mark of respectful sympathy. Yet Major Doveton was well known as one of their most strenuous opponents, a prominent member of the Reform Committee, and a leader who has played his part manfully in every fight where the Imperial Light Horse has been engaged. He was badly wounded among the band of heroes who held ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... masterly exposition of the principles of the Constitution and of the government established by it; of the duty of the citizen to understand the Constitution and to conform his conduct to its requirements; and of the right of the people to reform or to amend the Constitution in order to make representative government more effective and responsive to their present and future needs. The addresses on law and its administration state how legal procedure should be ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... comprehended than either Cushing or Choate. He had not much imagination, and his illustrations were simple and rather commonplace. As a debater he has had but few equals in our State. He was a radical, a reformer by nature. He was opposed to capital punishment, an advocate of temperance, of prison reform, and a zealous free trader. He made war upon the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 contending that the Constitution imposed upon the States the duty of returning fugitives from labor. This theory seemed to me at the time, as the result of ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... whom they were chosen to serve. While he bitterly opposed any measures involving radical change in the Constitution, he was no less ardent in denouncing political corruptions of all kinds whatsoever. In his Economical Reform he sought to curtail the enormous extravagance of the royal household, and to withdraw the means of wholesale bribery, which offices at the disposal of the king created. He did not believe that a more effective means than this lay in the proposed ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... reflective Kaiser, 'we are to suffer below what poor Cologne is doomed to undergo now, let us, by all that is savoury, reform ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... devils' gaiety of France, at least in all places whither its royalty came, ended appropriately in a marriage—a marriage of "The Reform" in the person of Prince Henry of Navarre, to Catholicism in the person of Margaret of Valois, Margaret of the "Memoirs," Charles's sister, in tacit defiance of, or indifference to, the Pope. With ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... and Better Use of the Domestic Relations Court. The Children to be Affected Society's Chief Care. A Uniform or Federal Divorce Law. Education Our Chief Reliance. Helps Toward Family Stability. Shall Society Favor the Remarriage of Divorced Persons? Turning from Compulsory to Attractive Methods of Reform. Questions. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... have since become obvious to most people, and in fighting for which (if a man can be said to fight for a 'phase'!) I suffered all that Tories could inflict upon me,—by expenses in law and calumnies in literature;—reform, Catholic claims, free trade, abolition of flogging, right of free speech, as opposed by attorneys-general. I was, in fact, all the while nothing but a poetic student, appearing in politics once a week, but given up entirely to letters almost all ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... and getting up very early in the morning. I am going to reform," and I left him at the chapel door, for he, being a scholar, sat in the seats behind all of us who ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... premise it's my honest conviction, That my breast is the chaos of all contradiction, Religious—deistic—now loyal and warm, Then a dagger-drawn democrat hot for reform; * * * * * Now moody and sad, now unthinking and gay, To all points of the compass ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... practical a man as President Quincy, but he was one of the best scholars in America. His administration has not been looked upon as a success, but he served to break the ice and to open the way for future navigation. He accepted the position with definite ideas of reform; but he lacked skill in the adaptation of means to ends. He was determined to show no favoritism to wealth and social position, and he went perhaps too far in the opposite direction. One day when the workmen were digging the cellar of Gray's Hall, President ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... will find that he can't be extravagant with me. Just let him be sent to the calaboose a few times, and thoroughly dressed down! I'll tell you if it don't bring him to a sense of his ways! O, I'll reform him, up hill and down,—you'll see. ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... offended, for that some of the old Ceremonies are retained still: If they consider that without some Ceremonies it is not possible to keep any Order, or quiet Discipline in the Church, they shall easily perceive just cause to reform their judgements. And if they think much, that any of the old do remain, and would rather have all devised anew: then such men granting some Ceremonies convenient to be had, surely where the old may be well used, there they cannot reasonably reprove the old only for their age, without bewraying ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... fixed principles. As Swinburne says of Blake, she was born into the church of rebels. Her present experience was her baptism. The times were exciting. The effect of the work of Voltaire and the French philosophers was social upheaval in France. The rebellion of the colonies and the agitation for reform at home had encouraged the liberal party into new action. Men had fully awakened to a realization of individual rights, and in their first excitement could think and talk of nothing else. The interest then taken in politics was general and wide-spread to a ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... reference to sanitation. A factory inspector has no sanitary powers; he cannot act save through the sanitary officer. The machinery of sanitary reform thus loses effectiveness. ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... We will admit that the Company was founded upon a philanthropic basis, to re-establish the balance of fortunes, redress the whims of chance and reform the abuses of society. Though he may be a robber, after the fashion of Karl Moor, your friend Morgan—was it not Morgan that this honest ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... reforming Church is a living Church. Reformation is a sign of animation, for a dead organism cannot reform itself. Then, continuity. The reformed man, must be the same man, or he would not be a reformed man but somebody else. So with the Church of England. It would have been quite possible, however ludicrous, to have established a new Church in the sixteenth century, but that would not ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... unfairly," or "You behaved shamefully:" as also "Don't contend with your brother," than "Don't envy your brother;" and "Avoid the woman who is your ruin," than "Stop ruining the woman." Such is the language employed in rebuke that desires to reform and not to wound; that rebuke which looks merely at the effect to be produced acts on another principle. For when it is necessary to stop people on the verge of wrong-doing, or to check some violent and ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... give me the sugar to sip from the bottom of his brandy glass in my babyhood? Haven't I drank my wine at his table, sitting by his side, three times a day for at least fifteen years? Haven't I seen him frown on every effort at temperance reform throughout the country? Haven't I seen him sneer at my weak, feeble efforts to break away from the demon with which he has constantly tempted me? If he didn't rear me up for a drunkard, what in the name of heaven am I designed for after such ...
— Three People • Pansy
... shall see Europe, God only knoweth. It is a kind of miracle bath brought us hither: and it must be little less, that shall bring us hence. Therefore in regard of our deliverance past, and our danger present, and to come, let us look up to God, and every man reform his own ways. Besides we are come here amongst a Christian people, full of piety and humanity: let us not bring that confusion of face upon ourselves, as to show our vices, or unworthiness before them. Yet there is ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... you have compromised, imperiled it by your exactions, you have violated the civil code: you have mixed yourself up in the discussions of business, and you have invaded the conjugal authority. —We must reform ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... trusts to bring about that his Majesty the French king and he shall become and remain in good, fast, and sure alliance together; and so ensuring that they three (the Pope, Francis, and Charles V.) shall be able to reform and set good order in the rest of Christendom. But whether his Unhappiness's—I mean his Holiness's—intention, is set for the welfare and utility of Christendom, or for his own insincerity and singular purpose, I remit that to God and to them that know more ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... what I meant; for if we must not reform, as well as be sorry for what is done, I have no notion what repentance means; indeed, at best I know little of the matter; but the nature of the thing seems to tell me that the first step we have to take is to break off this ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... suited him to speak. But when he did speak, he spoke only as a lawyer. He never allowed himself to be enticed away from his own profession by the meretricious allurements of general politics. On points of law reform, he had an energetic opinion; on matters connected with justice, he had ideas which were very much his own—or which at least were stated in language which was so; being a denizen of the common law, he was loud against the delays and cost of Chancery, and was supposed to have supplied ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... to his cost that if the reform had taken place at all, it must have been of extremely ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... long open to me. The old abbess died of a cold caught the evening of the fray; and the place, which might have been kept open until I was capable of filling it, was disposed of otherwise, when the English thought fit to reform, as they termed it, the discipline of the house; and instead of electing a new abbess, sent hither two or three friendly monks, who have now the absolute government of the community, and wield it entirely according ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... not understanding it, men institute innumerable reforms which involve no inward sacrifice, and each imagines that his reform is going to right the world for ever, while he himself continues to propagate evil by engaging it in his own heart. That only can be called reform which tends to reform the human heart, for all evil has its rise there, and not until the world, ceasing from selfishness ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... opinion of Griselda's promise to obey her lord, right or wrong, in all things, no reasons given, to submit in deed, and word, and look, and thought. If Mrs. Granby tells us that is her theory, we must all reform our practice." ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... attempt to reform the jail. The mockery, and roguery, and Vicar's perseverance, while a practised hand is picking his pocket—are admirably represented. "I therefore read them a portion of the service, with a loud unaffected voice, and found my audience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Christian doctrine, that society is bound to protect the weak. So far the middle age saw: but no further. For our own times has been reserved the higher and deeper doctrine, that it is the duty of society to make the weak strong; to reform, to cure, and above all, to prevent by education, by sanitary science, by all and every means, the necessity of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... anthropology, we shall find it useful to glance at its history in the course of the last half century, and notice the various theories that have contributed to its advance. The first attempt to give extensive expression to the reform of biology by Darwin's work will be found in my "Generelle Morphologie" (1866) ("Generelle Morphologie der Organismen", 2 vols., Berlin, 1866.) which was followed by a more popular treatment of the subject in my "Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte" ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... precipitated ghosts. The segregation of individual forms was, of course, impossible, so that men and horses were mingled in a horrible mixture of fricasseed spirits. I intended subsequently to empty the soup into a large reservoir and allow the separate specters to reform according to the laws ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... of Sweetbriar from Everett clean on through Crabtree down to that very young Tucker Poteet. You are one of the women that feed and clothe and blush on men like you were borned a hundred years ago and nobody had told you they wasn't worth shucks. Are you a-going to reform?" ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a supply. And note a peculiar fact: I have seldom seen a neater, more legible handwriting than that unbalanced fellow's. And the wording of his letters was exceedingly correct, just a little flowery. Invariable entreaties for assistance, always attended with resolutions to reform, vows, and promises on his honour.... All of it seemed—and perhaps was—sincere. Misha's signature to his letters was always accompanied by peculiar strokes, flourishes, and stops, and he made great use of marks of exclamation. In this first letter Misha informed me of a new 'turn ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... In 1997, an IMF mission to Gabon criticized the government for overspending on off-budget items, overborrowing from the central bank, and slipping on its schedule for privatization and administrative reform. The rebound of oil prices in 1999-2000 helped growth, but drops in production hampered Gabon from fully realizing potential gains. In December 2000, Gabon signed a new agreement with the Paris Club to reschedule its official debt. A ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... State is about to topple. Not only do we have to give them immediate reform, but we're going to have to blame the past hardships and mistakes on somebody. Somebody has to take the rap, be thrown to the wolves. If not, maybe we'll all wind up ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... He—perhaps you will kindly understand what I mean, if I say he behaved dishonestly. His employers consented, at my entreaty, to let him off without prosecuting. I begged very hard—I was fond of my son James—and I took him home, and did my best to reform him. He wouldn't stay with me; he went away again to London; he—I beg your pardon, sir! I'm afraid I'm confusing things; I'm afraid ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Andrew Karlovitch to transfer you from the fortress of Belogorsk to some still more distant place. Upon hearing of your wound your mother was taken ill, and is still confined to her bed. What will become of you? I pray God to reform you, but can scarcely hope for so much from his ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... public revenues. Reform in the land system. Municipal rights for towns and cities. The exclusion of judges from Parliament. That the council be directly responsible to the people ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... had to do with Priests. Up to this time I had not understood the chief aim of the Carmelite Reform. To pray for sinners delighted me; to pray for Priests, whose souls seemed pure as crystal, that indeed astonished me. But in Italy I realised my vocation, and even so long a journey was a small price to pay for such valuable knowledge. ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... the song was a drinking ceremony. (That is perhaps a painful fact, but then, you know, we cannot reform our forefathers.) During the first and second quatrain, sung decidedly forte, no ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... floods. The peasantry, indeed, resisted the improvements that have proved so beneficent to that part of England, because the draining and cultivation of so many miles of swamp would deprive them of fishing and fowling privileges enjoyed from time immemorial. Hardly any reform or improvement can be effected without some disruption of existing interests; and a people deeply sunk in poverty and toil could hardly be expected to contemplate with philosophical calm projects which, however advantageous ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... thus made everywhere and in every way to increase the comforts and conveniences of mankind turned the years 1820-1840 into a period of reform. Anything new was eagerly taken up. When, therefore, a Welshman named Robert Owen came over to this country, and introduced what he considered a social reform, numbers of people in the West became his followers. Owen believed that most of the hardships ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... 1904, Great Britain set to work with energy to reform her naval policy. Roused to action by the sense of coming danger, she augmented the size and number of vessels of all types; increased the personnel of all classes, regular and reserve; scrapped all obsolete craft; built (secretly) the epochal Dreadnaught, ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... own account: piracies by sea and robberies by land were hatched within their walls; and it took centuries to reduce those pampered and arrogant ports to the safe and peaceful rank of ordinary English cities. The Revolution of 1688 did something, and the Reform Bill of 1832 did more to make Dover and her insolent sisters like the other free and equal cities of England; but to this day there are remnants of public shows and pageantries left in those old towns sufficient to witness to the former privileges, power, and pride of the famous Cinque Ports. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... September and a great part of October the Mountain held its ground, and prevented the reform of the government. Billaud, gaining courage, declared that the lion might slumber, but would rend his enemies on awaking. By the lion, he meant himself and his friends of Thermidor. The governing Committees were reconstructed on the principle of frequent change; the law of Prairial, which ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... more oppressive, and the peasants were forbidden to apply directly to Ivan Petrovitch. The patriot heartily despised his fellow-citizens. Ivan Petrovitch's system was applied, in its full force, to Fedya only: his education actually was subjected to "radical reform"; his father had ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... was Percival Grunsky, and that at grammar school he had been called "Brownie" by the girls and "Blackie" by the boys. No more did he know that he had gone from half-way-through grammar school directly into the industrial reform school; nor that, after serving two years, he had been paroled out by Harris Collins, who made a living, and an excellent one, by training animals for the stage. Much less could he know the training that for six years Del Mar, as assistant, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... that by an early marriage a woman can train and change the inborn characteristics of her husband is a mistake. Few women can reform a husband after marriage. If she cannot reform him before marriage she will never do it afterward. These inborn traits will have their way despite anything she may be able to do to change them—only the man himself can control and govern them. During the period of this temperamental transformation ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... The besom of Protestant reform thought to sweep all vows off the face of the earth, as immoral, unlawful, unnatural or, at least, useless things. The first Coryphei broke theirs; and having learned from experience what troublesome things they are, instiled into their followers a salutary distaste ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... went up to the coach, and asked pardon for what he had done, imputing his own behaviour to his ignorance of the other's quality. The old nobleman accepted of his apology with great politeness, thanking him for the trouble he had taken to reform the manners of his domestics; and guessing from our youth's appearance that he was some stranger of condition, very courteously invited him into the coach, on the supposition that they were both going to the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... labors of Elizabeth Fry in the prisons of England. It was this woman's hand that pointed out the way for Fliedner in Germany. The prisons in his own land had remained untouched by any spirit of reform. The convicts were crowded together in small, filthy cells, and often in damp cellars without light or air; boys, who had thoughtlessly committed some trifling misdemeanor, with gray-headed, corrupt sinners; young girls with the most ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... is wrong for me to go riding on Sunday," went on Miss Lady, "it's wrong for you to go fishing. Suppose we both reform and stay ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... all men of his age and standing, has a great idea of the degeneracy of the times. He seldom expresses any political opinions, but we managed to ascertain, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, that Nicholas was a thorough Reformer. What was our astonishment to discover shortly after the meeting of the first reformed Parliament, that he was a most inveterate and decided Tory! It was very odd: some men change their opinions from necessity, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... is expressive of an entire policy. Such is the term Abolition. Though formerly used as a synonym of Anti-Slavery, people now clearly understand that the designs of those who have ranged themselves under the first of these systems of reform are of deeper significance and wider scope than are the objects contemplated by the latter, and concern themselves not only with the great primary question of bodily freedom, but take in also the collateral issues connected with human enfranchisement, ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... vote; that the use of the Lot should be abolished in marriages, in applications for membership, and in the election of deputies to the General Synod; and, finally, that at least one member of the U.E.C. should know something about American affairs. Thus did the Americans clear the way for Church reform. In Germany they were regarded as dangerous radicals. They were accused of an unwholesome desire for change. They designed, it was said, to pull down everything old and set up something new. At the General Synod (1818) most of their requests were refused; ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... centre to the circumference. But the churches—all denominations—of the years we are speaking about, began endless schemes of deliverance that the man, as they hoped, might be changed from the outside—that is to say, man's idea of benefitting man was by an outward reform. ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... good to show a great concern for my loss, and recommended most strongly to the King of France my famyly. His Majesty has been most extremely good and gracious to them. My son, that was Captain in Dillon's, has now the Brevet of Colonel reform'd with appointments of 1800 livres a-year; his sisters have 150 livres a-year each of them, with his royal promis of his protection of the famyly for ever. The Marquise de Mezire, and her daughter the Princess de Monteban ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... father was introduced to Newman by Mr. John Edward Taylor (of Norwich). She says she has a keen memory of Francis Newman coming to her father's house at Highgate at that time, with Pulszky and other Hungarians, all eager in the "efforts for reform and constitutional freedom and local government." But later on, she adds, many difficulties arose, and "about 1852 something connected with Louis Kossuth" (and the Hungarian movement) "caused a coolness" between the friends, and their correspondence seems ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... have some leisure to consult equally the hopeful prophets and the dismal prophets who are all wiser than any of the rest of us as to things at home here. My own strong impression is that whatsoever change the new Reform Bill may effect will be very gradual indeed and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... speak, not merely of the doubtful usefulness, but—as they were stronger in their language than their more self-denying and more consistent co-religionists—of the positive worthlessness of Establishments. The Voluntary controversy did not break out until about nine years after this time, when the Reform Bill gave vent to many a pent-up opinion and humour among that class to which it extended the franchise; but the materials of the war were evidently already accumulating among the intelligent Dissenters of Scotland; and from what I now saw, its ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... a rapidly-increasing class among the clergy, who were willing to help you to the uttermost—and you must feel that their help would be worth having—towards the attainment of social reform, if you would waive for a time ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... voice by Jordan's shore! A summons stern and clear: Reform! be just! and sin no more! God's judgment ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... to refer all who are interested in the topics discussed in my address on "Geological Reform," to the reply with which Sir ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of those subjects, which makes all the operas seem exactly alike, was the result of a certain literary reform which had tended to standardise opera libretti under the influence of Racine, and it was really a movement towards dignity and dramatic unity after the monstrous confusion of the earlier Venetian operas. As to the conventionality of the music, and its forms of air and recitative, ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... in city harbors, and fish-oil factories on the seashore), without becoming in the least civilized himself—in short, when we consider how he succeeds in doing what every wise person is trying to do, living his own proper life amid various and changing circumstances, it seems as if we might well reform the spelling of that supercilious ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... Robert Todd, and it is still known to old people by the name of the Greenland Close. There is, or was lately, an old stone placed over the door at the southern entrance into the yard, indicating the nature of the manufacture formerly carried on therein.[K] And before the Reform Bill was passed, Anstruther-Easter joined with the other four burghs of the district in sending a member to Parliament. Many thriving and respectable trades-people, whose forefathers had resided there for generations, and who looked upon the old buildings of their native ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... up there, by Jove," he said, tossing his head in the direction Guy had taken. "If Elersley has started a reform, it is time for the retail dealers in 'gratifications' to close up, for it is a sure sign we must ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera |
