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Reformer   /rɪfˈɔrmər/   Listen
Reformer

noun
1.
A disputant who advocates reform.  Synonyms: crusader, meliorist, reformist, social reformer.
2.
An apparatus that reforms the molecular structure of hydrocarbons to produce richer fuel.



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"Reformer" Quotes from Famous Books



... the truth, I had been wondering myself where all the money had gone to. Josephine was thoughtful for several minutes, then she said: "Do you know, Fred, I have a feeling that if you had managed your own campaign without the aid of a reformer you would have got just as many votes—and—and we should have had money enough ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant

... Moses," said Pen, with, as usual, somewhat of melancholy in his voice. "I have no laws from Heaven to bring down to the people from the mountain. I don't belong to the mountain at all, or set up to be a leader and reformer of mankind. My faith is not strong enough for that; nor my vanity, nor my hypocrisy, great enough. I will tell no lies, George, that I promise you; and do no more than coincide in those which are ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and singing his tunes and songs, and though frequently enough tormented by devils, yet still ready to throw aside the cares of life for a while, and enjoy himself in hearty intercourse with the various classes of the people. Who would have expected the German Reformer to be the author of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... request at public meetings, and especially during an election campaign. Into political contests he entered with all his might, and would sometimes be away a week or more at a time, stumping—as they used to term it—the district. In politics he was a Reformer, and under the then existing circumstances I think I should have been one too. But the vexed questions that agitated the public mind then, and against which he fought and wrote, have been adjusted. An old co-worker of his said to me many years after at ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight

... us not forget Ingersoll - the thumber over of past woes, whose five hundred dollar opera ticket identifies the class to which he now belongs, and proves his success as a fifteenth century reformer. The people made and keep up the acquaintance of this man by way of the ticket office, but instead of considering him as they would any other footlight performer, who had struck a paying vein and was working it for all it was worth, and who can only ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood

... passions are slender, whose imagination is active, and whose happiness lies, not in doing, but in perceiving—half a poet, half a critic, and all a spectator. He is contrasted, excellently, with the figure of Hollingsworth, the heavily treading Reformer, whose attitude with regard to the world is that of the hammer to the anvil, and who has no patience with his friend's indifferences and neutralities. Coverdale is a gentle sceptic, a mild cynic; he would agree that life is a little worth ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... places lived women brought from Suruga. Besides these there afterwards came women from Fushimi and from Nara, who lodged scattered here and there throughout the town. This appears to have scandalized a certain reformer, named Shoji Jinyemon, who, in the year 1612, addressed a memorial to the Government, petitioning that the women who lived in different parts of the town should be collected in one "Flower Quarter." His petition was granted ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford

... introduced me to Mr. Joseph Hume, the great penny-wise and pound-foolish reformer, he begged me to bear in mind that he was only a Scotchman, or "no better than a Scotchman"; and he once gave me an open letter to the celebrated philanthropist, Dr. Southwood Smith, which he asked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... secret of the conspiracy against the late emperor, aggravated the guilt of murder by the baseness of hypocrisy, and heightened contempt by detestation. To alienate the soldiers, and to provoke inevitable ruin, the character of a reformer was only wanting; and such was the peculiar hardship of his fate, that Macrinus was compelled to exercise that invidious office. The prodigality of Caracalla had left behind it a long train of ruin and disorder; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... eighth day, by a vote of 104 to 6 the Assembly adopted Roosevelt's resolution and appointed an investigating committee. The evidence taken amply justified Roosevelt's charges, in spite of which the committee gave a whitewashing verdict. Nevertheless the "young reformer" had not only proved his case, but had suddenly made a name for himself in the State and in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... F. R. M.!" exclaimed Jerry. "Long may it wave! Only there's one glorious truth that I feel it my duty to impress on your minds. The way of the reformer is hard." ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... interpreted them with a sympathy which was no less an intuition of their truth than a reflection of his own genius upon them. We are enabled in some measure to judge of this by a paper entitled 'Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine', written by Dr. Edward Berdoe for the Browning Society, and read at its October meeting in 1888; and in the difficulty which exists for most of us of verifying the historical data of Mr. Browning's poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as well as an interesting ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... turning their faces to the king's throne and their backs to the altar of God, shows a spirit different indeed from that of Bossuet—a spirit not far removed from the undermining criticism of the eighteenth century itself. Yet La Bruyere was not a social reformer nor a political theorist: he was simply a moralist and an observer. He saw in a flash the condition ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... bounty-money; that he had traversed England through nearly all its parts, sometimes robbing on the highway, and sometimes filching and stealing in towns while he worked at his trade: that he went to America, where he commenced politician and reformer of abuses, and where he conceived the notion of serving the cause of liberty by burning our shipping and our principal trading cities and towns; that he then left America for France, where he had several interviews with Silas Deane, the agent of congress; that Silas Deane encouraged ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... outraged frame of mind, and properly so. Politically speaking, George was what might be called, for lack of a better term, a passive reformer. That is, he read religiously the New York Nation, was totally opposed to the spoils system of party rewards, and was ostensibly as right-minded a citizen as one would expect to find in a Sabbath day's journey. He subscribed one dollar a year to the ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... Christmas wassail. So far his folly is merely pitiable, but his intolerance makes it offensive. He cannot enjoy his own tipple unless he can deprive me of mine. A fox that has lost his tail. There is no tyrant like a thoroughpaced reformer. I drink ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... involved the freedom of slaves and reform in the civil service, his silence as to the one and his declaration as to the other were certainly sufficient to allay any suspicion that he was to become a radical reformer. He did recommend a legislative interpretation of the Constitution relating to the governor's exclusive right to nominate to office; but in the blandest and most complimentary words, the Legislature invited the Governor to let well enough alone. "The evidence of ability, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... who would repudiate the name of Christian. Chief among the abuses of Hinduism to be attacked has been the traditional attitude toward woman. Child marriage and compulsory widowhood are condemned by every social reformer up and down the length of India. The battle is fought not only for women, but by them also. Agitation for the suffrage has been carried on in India's chief cities. In Poona not long since the educated women of the city, Hindu, ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... he was a religious reformer, sincerely and profoundly pious, and conscientious to the point of honor. Indeed, his conscience was so sensitive, that he had been known to confess two and three times on the same day. The cavaliere called him an atheist because he was a ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot

... General Booth's great scheme is in harmony with views that are accepted by all Christians. His design is to elevate the wretched to more favourable conditions of life, on the principle of the Temperance reformer who seeks to remove temptations to drunkenness; or of the opponent of the iniquitous opium traffic, who insists upon the prohibition of the drug which is the curse of millions; or of the antagonist of licensed impurity, who demands that the tendency of law shall ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... edge, uttered in the height of zeal (and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet not suiting with every low decrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, the reformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon him their dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be lost, for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of a perfunctory licenser. And to what an author this violence hath been lately done, and in ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton

... that his ideals will hold good 'till the swan turns black and the crow turns white, till the hills rise up and travel and the deeps rush into the rivers.' That's how Weigall ends up the life he has written of the great reformer. How can you say that we owe nothing to him? You might as well say that we owe nothing to any of the great men of whom we have never heard, and yet you know that thought affects the whole world. Akhnaton made himself immortal by his prophecies—they were the eternal ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... private hearts.... And further I will not dissemble my hope that each person whom I address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidity, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man who must find or cut ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... 1415, the Bohemian Reformer, John Hus, was burned at the stake. But those who had silenced him could not unsay his message, and at last there drew together a little body of earnest men, who agreed to accept the Bible as their only standard of faith and practice, and established a strict discipline which ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries

... with gravity, with emotion, with unction, as if performing some moral trick with a view to an eternal reward. We made a chorus of affirmation to his wildest assertions, as though he had been a millionaire, a politician, or a reformer—and we a crowd of ambitious lubbers. When we ventured to question his statements we did it after the manner of obsequious sycophants, to the end that his glory should be augmented by the flattery of our dissent. He ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... life became the forfeit. But the present age was perforce more tolerant; and was likewise wanting in those peculiar political conditions which had combined with the religious issue to send the great reformer to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... real fact, as applicable to the degraded and hypocritical mass which leavens the present English generation, and is the only answer they deserve. The hackneyed and lavished title of Blasphemer—which, with Radical, Liberal, Jacobin, Reformer, etc., are the changes which the hirelings are daily ringing in the ears of those who will listen—should be welcome to all who recollect on whom it was originally bestowed. Socrates and Jesus Christ were put to death publicly as ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... Save Austria! save him from the curse that threatens both. We have not yet completed the noble edifice of which eleven years ago we laid the foundations. We must finish the structure, and so solid must be its walls that our thoughtless young reformer shall not have strength to batter them down. Your majesty must remain the reigning Empress of Austria. You cannot resign your empire to your son. Duty and the welfare of your subjects ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... not," he says, "supported by the public, which my labours are designed to benefit, those labours must necessarily cease." Now, my argument for supposing that the proceeds should be equally divided is, that I claim to be the real reformer; that it will be seen by those who may attend the discussion, that it is I that am the true moralist—I shall go with the New Testament in one hand, and Dr. Paley's Moral Philosophy in the other, and upon that battery, and no other, will I plant my ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... splendidly serious. He was as splendidly serious as a reformer. By a single urgent act of thought he would have made himself a man, and changed imperfection into perfection. He desired—and there was real passion in his desire—to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his best, in living according ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... time he was generally accounted an outrageous and shameful offender. At the present date many persons entertain essentially the same view, although softened by lapse of years, and by respect for his standing as a poet: others regard him as a conspicuous reformer. Some take a medium course, and consider him to have been sincere, and so far laudable; but rash and reckless of consequences, and so far censurable. His poetry also has been subject to very different ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... us is Mr. Michael Biddulph, a partner in that highly-respectable firm, Cocks, Biddulph, and Co. Twenty years ago Mr. Biddulph sat as member for his native county of Hereford, ranked as a Liberal and a reformer, and voted for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church and other measures forming part of Mr. Gladstone's policy. But political events with him, as with some others, have moved too rapidly, and now he, sitting as member for the Ross Division of the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... Alcott did while he staid among us was to circulate some copies of your Man the Reformer.* I did not get a copy; I applied for one, so soon as I knew the right fountain; but Alcott, I think, was already gone. And now mark,—for this I think is a novelty, if you do not already know it: Certain Radicals have reprinted your Essay in Lancashire, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... were to point out one trait rather than another that makes Bernard Shaw, for so brilliant a man, so ineffective as a leader, or literary statesman, or social reformer, it would be his modesty. He has never ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... dignity of manner and refinement of utterance. There is an entire absence of the fierceness that is to be found in some of Whittier's and Timrod's sectional lyrics. Hayne lacked the fierce energy of a great reformer or partisan leader. But nowhere else do we find a heart more sensitive to grandeur of achievement or pathos of incident. He recognized the unsurpassed heroism of sentiment and achievement displayed in the war; and in an ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... first place the Free Press, being a reformer, suffered from what all reformers suffer from, to wit, that in their origins they must, by ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc

... but little hope of a happy future for our race. I will also say, in order to be perfectly frank, that even if we should admit that our civilization was advancing, we should not attribute it to the influence of the Jewish reformer." ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... these social reformers do a good work—their schemes are at least suggestive, and moreover they point out signs of the times. They show us unmistakably that with our advance there is a tendency to become more and more selfish and to regard with less true charity the condition of the weak. One social reformer will say that there will not be any suffering because therapeutics will have overtaken every disease that the flesh is heir to, or better still, that some new discovery will have made it possible to heal all sicknesses without the tedious work of surgeons and nurses. Healing will become ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll

... gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and Captain Symmes, from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school; and Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... late Life of Calvin, spells the word Phallicus, and supposes it to allude to some amorous propensities of the reformer. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various

... capital can move without hindrance to the points at which they can create the largest products and get the largest rewards—its action cannot be stopped, while that of the forces that disturb it can be so. In this is the most inspiriting fact for the social reformer. If there are "inspiration points" on the mountain-tops of science, as well as on those of nature, this is one of them, and it is reached whenever a man discovers that in a highly imperfect society the fundamental law makes for justice, that it is impossible to prevent it from ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark

... over his countrymen. He died in 478 B.C., at the age of seventy-three. Laou-tsze, another famous thinker, was a few years older than Confucius. "Three precious things," he said, "I prize, and hold fast,—humility, compassion, and economy." Mencius, a celebrated teacher and reformer, who followed in the path of Confucius, after a long life died in 289 B.C. One of his doctrines was, that the nature of man is good, and that evil is owing to education and circumstances. One of his maxims was, that the people can be ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... But Providence designed that his passions should be made subservient to the welfare of his race. It is to his glory that he had enlargement of mind sufficient to perceive the true sources of national prosperity. To secure this, therefore, became the aim of his life. He became a reformer; but a reformer, like Hildebrand, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and stepson. It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of coal secured his appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to the task than the interest of that employment mastered him. The vacant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... liberty, could see nothing to reprobate in the iron tyranny of Strafford and Laud. But, whatever judgment the Whig or the Tory of that age might pronounce on transactions long past, there can be no doubt that, as respected the practical questions then pending, the Tory was a reformer, and indeed an intemperate and indiscreet reformer, while the Whig was conservative even to bigotry. We have ourselves seen similar effects produced in a neighbouring country by similar causes. Who would have believed, fifteen years ago, that M. Guizot and M. Villemain would have to defend ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... of culture explains to us the impulses and conditions of life and thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had a hot temper and said such and such things; we learn that Rousseau was suspicious and wrote such and such books; but we do not learn why after the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why during the French Revolution they ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... had spent the years 1493-96 in Florence (p. 254), during the period when Savonarola (1452-98) was preaching moral reform there, returned home, not only a humanist, but a religious reformer as well, and began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of Saint Paul in the Greek. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (author of Utopia), among others, formed a little group of humanists all of whom were also deeply interested in ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... thorough-paced reformer," continued Mr Moffat, somewhat reassured by the effect of the opportune words which his friend had whispered into his ear. "A thorough-paced ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... wanting, it is clearly the duty of authority to act vigorously in the case. Yet its act will go down to posterity as an instance of a tyrannical interference with private judgment, and of the silencing of a reformer, and of a base love of corruption or error; and it will show still less to advantage, if the ruling power happens in its proceedings to evince any defect of prudence or consideration. And all those ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... the governorship in New Orleans and Hampton in Columbia. But it was not by this act alone that the new President inaugurated a new regime. He called to his Cabinet as postmaster-general, David M. Key, of Tennessee, who had fought for the Confederacy. Schurz, liberal and reformer of the first rank, was given the department of the interior. Evarts in the State department; Devens, of Massachusetts, as attorney-general; Sherman in the treasury, to complete the work of resumption; McCrary, of Iowa, and Thompson, of Indiana, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... would soon dawn. He awaited it with a smile of confidence. In his opinion, indeed, he merely had to overthrow that ministry and perhaps another one, and then he himself would at last take the reins of power in hand, like a reformer who would know how to pacify the nation. As outside Socialists often declared, it was evident that the blood of a dictator flowed in that sectarian's veins. His feverish, stubborn rhetoric ended by exhausting his interrupters, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... homely, affectionate names, thinking he was entirely one of them—a little more clever, a little less ambitious in the usual channels of business and enterprise. He had no "moral strenuousness of the reformer" and no "exclusiveness" of learning. He "accepted the fabric of traditional American political thought." He seemed "but the average product," and yet, as this same writer has said, "at bottom Abraham Lincoln differed as essentially from the ordinary western American ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... As that advanced reformer, Philippe le Bel, died before the institutions he had established had taken root, for many years, even down to the time of Louis XI., a continual conflict for supremacy was waged between the Parliament ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... a reformer can't last in politics. He can make a show for a while, but he always comes down like a rocket. Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business. You've got to be trained up to it or you're sure to fail. Suppose a man who ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt

... nothing so excruciating as to hear blanks, dashes, initials, and half words, without the key. Nothing makes a girl look so silly and unpalatable. Naturally, the reason why Captain Beauchamp is more talked about than the rest is the politics. Your grand reformer should be careful. Doubly heterodox will not do! It makes him interesting to women, if you like, but he won't soon hear the last of it, if he is for a public career. Grancey literally crowed at the story. And the wonderful part of it is, that Captain Beauchamp ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a circle of noble men and women, steadfast friends alike of the anti-slavery, temperance and woman suffrage movements. The names of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Dennett, Miss. Charlotte A. Thomas and Mrs. Ellen French Foster are worthy of mention. That untiring reformer, the Hon. Neal Dow, has clearly seen and declared in the later years of his labors, that suffrage for women is the short path to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... The fact was that the Reverend T. W. Beasley was accustomed to university students, and could not focus his mind to the intellectual range of girls of thirteen to seventeen. Moreover, he was by nature a reformer. He liked to give others the benefit of his advice, and he had much to say in private to his sister upon the subject of her pupils' lessons and general management. Perhaps poor Miss Beasley had not expected quite so much criticism. She was ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... existence. The strength of the Freethought position is in no-wise injured by the admission that a young Jew named Joshua (i.e. Jesus) may have wandered up and down Galilee and Judaea in the reign of Tiberius, that he may have been a religious reformer, that he may have been put to death by Pontius Pilate for sedition. All this is perfectly likely, and to allow it in no way endorses the mass of legend and myth encrusted round this tiny nucleus of possible fact. This obscure peasant ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... people. This genealogy counts fourteen generations from Huli-houna, the first man, to Nuu, or Nana-nuu, but inclusive, on the line of Laka. The third genealogy, which, properly speaking, is that of Paao, the high-priest who came with Pili from Tahiti, about twenty-five generations ago, and was a reformer of the Hawaiian priesthood, and among whose descendants it has been preserved, counts only twelve generations from Kumuhonua to Nuu, on the line of Kapili, ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various

... make rather light of the communications from spirits concerning Christ. It seems, nevertheless, that all the testimony received from advanced spirits only shows that Christ was a medium and reformer in Judea; that he now is an advanced spirit in the sixth sphere; but that he never claimed to be God, and does not at present. I have had two communications to that effect. I have also read some that Dr. Hare had. If I am wrong in my views of the Bible, ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith

... of endurance. A fanatic in faith, by virtue of certain asperities of mind and a critical temperament, he had never made friends, won his parish into close ties, nor advanced the cause of his religion as he had yearned to do. With the zeal of a reformer, he had entered the ministry in youth; but while commanding respect for his own rule of conduct and the example he set his little flock, their affection he never won. The people feared him, and dreaded his stern criticism. Once certain spirits, smarting under pulpit censure, had ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... to write the biography of a great man complained to me lately, that in consulting a dozen of his friends—men and women who had known him as preacher, orator, reformer, and poet—so few of them had anything characteristic and fine to relate. "What," he said "is the use of trying to write biography with such mummies for witnesses! They would have seen just as much if they had had nothing but glass eyes ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... delegates attended from various parts of Great Britain and the Colonies, from America, France, and other countries. A meeting was held under "The Reformer's Tree," in Hyde Park, Miss Burroughs, a coloured lady, being on the platform, also Mr. Britto, a coloured vocalist, and the singing being led by a coloured choir. The President, Dr. Clifford of London, stated that there were present 4,000 delegates, from all parts of the world, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... Firebrands. In these days of trouble and rebuke, when (if we may judge from a recent article savouring of Neal's second volume) it seems to be expected that English gentlemen will, in a Magazine that bears their name, be pleased with a rechauffe of democratic obloquy upon the character of the great reformer of their church, and will look with favour upon Canterburies Doome, would it not be desirable that Robert Ware's (and Nalson's) curious and important work should be republished? If a reprint of it were to be undertaken, I would direct attention to a copy ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various

... prejudices would be sure to do injustice to Dunlop," Edward rejoined; "but, I fear," he added, "there is need in the political arena of Upper Canada of just such a Reformer as he." ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam

... earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.... There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God." There was also that other which, under reverses and discouragements, was the solace of our own reformer, "If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us: then they had swallowed us up quick.... Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth." As they mused ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... its social, political, and religious traditions alike threatened, the bulk of Englishmen swung round into an attitude of fierce resistance. The craving for self-preservation hushed all other cravings. What men looked for in Pitt now was not the economist or the reformer, but the son of Chatham, the heir of his father's courage, of his father's faith in the greatness of England. And what they looked for they found. Pitt was no born War Minister; he had none of the genius that commands victory, or of the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... the convention ratified the nomination with the unanimity of a stage mob. We knew that his election was as sure as sunrise, and I set to work looking up models for my bills with all the enthusiasm of the first reformer. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various

... is inconsistent with the testimony of facts. The usurpations of the Romish see called for resistance,[32] and Henry to a certain extent resisted them. The abuses in the church needed reformation, and Henry showed that he possessed the spirit of a real reformer, bent on the correction of what was wrong, but uncompromising in his maintenance of the religion which he embraced in his heart. He gave proof of a spirit more Catholic than Roman, ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... The man that does not know the real story of the life of Saint Vincent de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. This Frenchman really fought with beasts for the life of children, and was the only real reformer in the France of ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... council. Why, that they have done before now, and yet have acted with them again. It is very true; but a little word has escaped Mr. Pitt, which never entered into his former declarations; nay, nor into Cromwell's, nor Hugh Capet's, nor Julius Caesar's, nor any reformer's of ancient time. He has happened to say, he will guide. Now, though the cabinet council are mighty willing to be guided, when they cannot help it, yet they wish to have appearances saved: they cannot be fond of being told they are to be guided still less, that other people ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... Dostoievsky never forgave Turgenieff for this forgiveness. Another merit of these letters is the light they shed on the true character of Tolstoy, who is shown in his proper environment, neither a prophet nor a heaven-storming reformer. Dostoievsky invented the phrase: "land-proprietor literature," to describe the fiction of both Tolstoy and Turgenieff. He was abjectly poor, gambled when he got the chance (which was seldom), hated Western Europe, France and Germany in particular, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... whose original researches have enriched our national history, has this observation on the character of WICKLIFFE: —"To complete our idea of the importance of Wickliffe, it is only necessary to add, that as his writings made John Huss the reformer of Bohemia, so the writings of John Huss led Martin Luther to be the reformer of Germany; so extensive and so incalculable are the consequences which sometimes follow from human actions."[A] Our historian has accompanied this by giving the very feelings of Luther in ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... not wandering knights, pursuing fire-flies, supposing them to be stars; but be as Arthur, who found the Holy Grail, and drained its sacramental wine in truest fashion, in "staying by the stuff;" in being statesman, soldier, defender of the weak, reformer, liver of a clean life in public place, builder of a State, negotiator of schemes which make for the diminution of earth's ills and increase of earth's fairer provinces. Edward the Confessor was a monk, wearing a king's crown ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... fact that Mr. Pardriff and his wife and his maid-servant and his hired man travelled on pink mileage books, which could only be had for love—not money. On the other hand, reputable witnesses had had it often from Mr. Pardriff that he was a reformer, and not at all in sympathy with certain ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... during the interval between this happy consummation and the accession of Ferdinand I. to the throne, that certain events took place which seem to me to demand a moment's notice. John of Rokysan, though a zealous reformer in principle, was yet unwilling to break the bond of ecclesiastical union, or, as his enemies assert, was desirous of gratifying two passions at the same time, by uniting the character of a reformer to that of an archbishop in a well-endowed church. The better to conciliate both the pope and ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... deeper endowments and the mastery that will make them happy. It is the discovery of what they can not do, and ought not to attempt, that transforms reformers into statesmen; and great should be the joy of the world over every reformer who comes to himself. The spectacle is not rare; the method is not hidden. The practicability of every reform is determined absolutely and always by "the circumstances of the case," and only those who put themselves into the midst of affairs, either by ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson

... but no inducements could induce him to go to the poll. Gradually, under persistent cross-examination, he revealed his mind. He was old enough to remember the days before the Reform Bill of 1832. His father had been an ardent reformer. Everyone believed that, if only the Bill were passed, hunger and poverty and misery would be abolished, and the poor would come by their own. He said—and this was the curious point—that firearms were stored in his father's cottage, to be used in a popular rising ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... advise every young man who intends to enter the pulpit to read carefully the best life of this wonderful preacher, reformer, and statesman. And supplement your study of him and his methods by reading George Eliot's historical ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... Martin Luther the credit of introducing the Christmas tree into Germany. He may have helped to make it popular, but certainly there is abundant evidence to prove that it was known long before the Reformer's time. It is generally supposed to have its origin in mythological times and to be a vestige of ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann

... statesman should regard political power as intrinsically desirable, that the merchant and the manufacturer should live to make money, and that the highest motive which appeals to all men alike should be the desire to bulk large in the eyes of their fellow-men. Even the ardent reformer, whose enthusiasm makes him unselfish, pursues the ideal to which he devotes himself, as an end in itself, and makes no attempt to define or interpret it in terms of its relation to that supreme and central ideal which ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... Plessis, and the rebuilding of the college of the Sorbonne, are among the monuments of this part-statesmanship. His, also, is much of that praise usually lavished on Louis XIV for the career opened in the seventeenth century to science, literature, and art. He was also a reformer, and his zeal was proved, when in the fiercest of the La Rochelle struggle he found time to institute great reforms not only in the army and navy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... the religion of the ancient Persians is principally derived from the Zendavesta, or sacred books of that people. Zoroaster was the founder of their religion, or rather the reformer of the religion which preceded him. The time when he lived is doubtful, but it is certain that his system became the dominant religion of Western Asia from the time of Cyrus (550 B.C.) to the conquest of Persia by Alexander the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... man," she said, twisting her shoulders. "It seems there's nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of $5000 ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller

... aware that the term "Radical" (in its first form, "Radical Reformer") does not appear until a few years later; but I use it here and in the following chapters because there is no other word ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... And, although a certain fatal spiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent from the world of practical life, his sympathy with action, whether it was the action of the politician or the social reformer, or merely that steady half-conscious performance of its daily duty which keeps humanity sweet and living, was unfailing. His horizon was not bounded by his own "prison-cell," or by that dream-world which he has described with so ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the esteem of his people, but never their favour. Upright and well-informed, he called to him sterling honesty and clear intelligence in the person of Turgot. But with the philosophic sentiment of the necessity of reforms, the prince had not the feeling of a reformer; he had neither the genius nor the boldness; nor had his ministers more than himself. They raised all questions without settling any, accumulated storms, without giving them any impulse, and the tempests were doomed to be eventually directed against ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... such types of men as John Howard, the prison reformer, and George Peabody, who devoted his great fortune to bettering the housing of the poor and to multiplying and improving schools. These men—especially the latter—were practical and sane, and were prompted in their endeavors ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler

... teachings usually accepted in the churches are numerous. One here quoted will fairly represent the general type. It was drawn up by Richard Acland Armstrong (1843-1905), an eager social reformer, a powerful preacher and author, and memorable especially as a popularizer of Martineau's religious philosophy. Of course, from what has been already said, such a statement is not regarded as an authoritative creed, but simply takes its place as one out of many summaries ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant

... it is a narrow basis, because the possession of money is of itself no guarantee of political ability, and the system leads to the very questionable proposition that every rich man is a competent social reformer. It is, however, a sort of competence, but a competence very precariously established and ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... schoolmaster, archdeacon, Cistercian abbot, Bishop of Worcester, and primate—a silent, dark, strong man, gentle, studious, and unworldly—was delighted at the request. He sent off Robert of Bedford, an ardent reformer and brilliant scholar, and Roger Roldeston, another distinguished scholar, who afterwards was Dean of Lincoln. These, like Aaron and Hur, upheld the lawgiver's hands, and they, with others of a like kidney, soon changed the face of affairs. ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... distinct methods of preaching: one, that with the manuscript; the other, that without. The last time that I had the chance of a Sunday in Trinity Church was Luther's day. The morning discourse was a luminous and generous appreciation of the great reformer's character and work. This was read in that rapid, vehement, incessant manner which description has made sufficiently familiar to the public. The precipitation of utterance is like the flowing forth of the liquid contents of a bottle suddenly inverted; every word seems hurrying to be foremost. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... that they may not feel themselves conquered by Russia, but united to her for their own clear advantage; therefore, not only their civil but their political laws have been maintained." This liberal policy was continued by the various Tsars throughout the century, the reformer Alexander II. taking particular interest in the development of the Grand-Duchy, which he evidently regarded as a place where experiments in political liberty were being worked out that might later be applied to the rest of Russia. The weakness of Finland's position ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... negative was invited, gave the required assurance. "As a matter of fact," said he, "it was the Prince who asked me to go—suggested it, that is to say." And immediately official confidence was restored, for to the Lord Functionary Max as a reformer was still unknown, while his taste for frivolous diversion was more easily assumed. And so in due course a copy of the play ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... self-interest would lead every nation to carry into full effect the golden rule of Christianity; and yet even now, the most distinguished men in England regard smuggling almost as a virtuous act, and the smuggler as a great reformer, because his labours tend to enable their countrymen to do everywhere what has been done in the West Indies, in Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and India—separate the consumer from the producer. They regard it as the appointed work of England ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... convents and churches were saved from violence, and the art treasures of the city were not destroyed. Among the most important Lutherans was Pirkheimer, Duerer's friend. We do not know that Duerer became a Lutheran, but he wrote of his admiration for the great reformer in his diary, and it is a meaning fact that during the last six years of his life Duerer made no more pictures ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement

... compared with the merits which wise men concede to me,—if not in my single self, yet as the representative of a class—of being the grand reformer of the age. From my spout, and such spouts as mine, must flow the stream that shall cleanse our earth of the vast portion of its crime and anguish, which has gushed from the fiery fountains of the still. In this ...
— A Rill From the Town Pump (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... bring him forth, alive again and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors, to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world; I have touched him in my turn with that "mace of death," which Carlyle has attributed to Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M'Crie. Yet I believe ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a widely different character pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper, and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer of the very highest and best class,—as the man who alone thoroughly understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the other day about a religious reformer who arose in Eastern lands a few years since, and gathered many disciples. He and his principal follower were seized and about to be martyred. They were suspended by cords from a gibbet, to be fired at by a platoon of soldiers. And as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... place so celebrated and so well known, and its reformer so famous, that I shall say but little about it. I will, however, mention that this abbey is five leagues from La Ferme-au-Vidame, or Arnold, which is the real distinctive name of this Ferme among so many other Fetes in France, which have preserved the generic name of what ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... The Reformer is either a Savior or a Rebel, all depending on whether he succeeds or fails, and your point of view. He is what he is, regardless of what other men think of him. The man who is indicted and executed as a rebel, often afterward has the word "Savior" carved on his tomb; and sometimes men who ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... fresh burst of candor, 'you will never be a Reformer, until you possess some of the commonest elements ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... lifted his masculinity into aesthetic regions; she caught glimpses, too, of an unfamiliar mongrel species of intellect with which she would relish Platonic relations. Yet with this glow upon her she regarded the reformer's noble face and benignant blond beard doubtfully, thinking how she used to stick pins in brilliant bubbles when she was a child, and nothing would be left but a patch ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... instinct of the reformer. Hardly were we settled in the "three-seater," preparatory to returning home after the service, when she began. "Do you make your own clothes?" she ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken

... their religious belief, and where they may have entire freedom of action as regards caste rules. The whole account given by the Pundita of the life of the high-caste Hindu lady is full of suggestion for the social reformer and the student of progress, and her book, which is wonderfully well written, is likely to produce a radical change in the educational schemes that at present prevail ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... indulgent. Peter, not being himself a reformer, or an idealist, or a lover of progress, or even, according to himself, of liberty, but an acceptor of things as they are and a lover of the good things of this world, was not particularly interesting to his uncle, of course; but, being rather an endearing boy, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... of what I have said, refer yourselves to some architect of established reputation, and ask him whether I am right or not. You might as well, had you lived in the sixteenth century, have asked a Roman Catholic archbishop his opinion of the first reformer. I deny his jurisdiction; I refuse his decision. I call upon you to be Bereans in architecture, as you are in religion, and to search into these things for yourselves. Remember that, however candid a man may be, it is too much to expect ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin

... restored. This is a comparatively modern instance. Away back two hundred and more years B.C., we find the famous builder of the Great Wall attempting an impossible task with no better result. He was a great reformer—indeed the first universal emperor of all existing China, which was consolidated by his genius. The privileged classes, of course, opposed his reforms and gave him much trouble by holding up to the admiration of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... you so close. But do you know what's going on in this country right now, Mr. Popple? There's a regular organized band of law-breakers operating from one end of the nation to the other. We're tryin' to bust it up, but it's a tough job. The best way to reform a reformer is to rob him. The minute he finds out he's been robbed he turns over a new leaf and begins to beller like a bull about how rotten the police are. Ninety nine times out of a hundred he quits his cussed interferin' with the law and becomes a decent, ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon

... altogether too good for poor folks, and she really didn't know what she should do with him, it seemed too bad to send him away shelterless, that stormy November night. Besides, her husband was a rising politician,—the public-spirited Judge Gingerford, you know,—the eloquent philanthropist and reformer;—and to have it said that his door had been shut against a perishing stranger might hurt him. So, as I remarked, she concluded to take pity on the boy, and, after duly weighing the matter, to call him back. And she called,—though, as I suspect, not very loud. ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... without knowing the facts and circumstances? The President must have a reason for wishing to make a change. He should give that reason to the Senate without waiting to be asked. He has assured the country that he is a civil service reformer; that no man is to be turned out because he is a Republican, and no man appointed because he is a Democrat. Now, the Senate has given the President an opportunity to prove that he has acted as he has talked. If the President feels that he is bound to carry out the civil-service ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... it may be called, owed its origin to a certain Majus Mani, banished from Persia under the Sassanides; this Mani was a talented man, highly civilised through his studies and voyages in distant lands. In his exile he conceived the idea of putting himself forward as the reformer of the religions of all the peoples he had visited, and of reducing them all to one universal religion. Banished by the Christians, to whom he represented himself as the divinely inspired apostle of Jesus, in whom the Comforter had appeared, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... the track follows the wheelbarrow, as the cracker pursues the cheese. I am a derivative of alcohol, the one and infallible argument against temperance, Miss Knight. In me you behold the shining example of all that puts the reformer to rout and gladdens the heart ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... his way, had he consented to his divorce from Catharine, Henry would have always remained a very good and active servant of the Catholic Church. But they were imprudent enough to irritate him by contradiction; they stimulated his vanity and pride to resistance; and so Henry became a church reformer, not from conviction, but out of pure love of opposition. And that, my child, you must never forget, for, by means of this lever, you may very well convert him again to a devout, dutiful, and obedient servant of our holy Church. He has ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach

... was a time when the cathedral was not so dishonored. Once these walls were covered with valuable shrines, pictures, and tapestries, and costly jewels glittered everywhere. There was one huge emerald which was said to cure diseases of the eyes. Here came John Wycliffe, the great reformer, at the summons of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to answer for the publication of his new doctrines. Here, Henry of Bolingbroke prayed for his successful seizure of the throne, and here he also wept over the grave of his father, John ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson

... were always shy of this young person, because, having an acute brain and generous impulses, and being a New-Englander by birth, she had believed herself called to be a reformer, and had lectured in public last winter. Her lightest remarks had, somehow, an oratorical twang. The man might have seen what a true, grand face hers would be, when time had taken off the acrid, aggressive heat which the, to her, novel wrongs in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... Anthropomorphic conceptions are laid aside; ritual is abandoned as savouring of magic; hierocracy as part of an obsolete caste system; metaphysical dogma because the Infinite cannot be weighed in the balances of human reason. The truce to fanaticism called by Akbar the Great encouraged a poet and reformer named Tulsi Dasa (1532-1623) to point a surer way to salvation. He adored Krishna, the preserving influence incarnate as Rama, and rehandled Valmiki's great epic, the Ramayana, in the faint rays of Christian light which penetrated India during that age of transition. Buddha had proclaimed ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... authorities became aware of his existence, and also of the fact that he was drawing together a following on a scale which might prove dangerous to the public peace. It was then that force of circumstances changed his status from that of a religious reformer to that of a political adventurer; and almost simultaneously with the advent of Hsien Feng to the Imperial power, the long-smouldering discontent with Manchu rule, carefully fostered by the organization of the Triad society, broke into open rebellion. A sort ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... zeal of a true reformer, danced down to the servants' quarters to find May Lily, one of the cook's grandchildren. May Lily, a neat-looking coloured girl of seventeen, had been one of Lloyd's most loyal followers since they made mud pies together on ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston

... himself a convert to the Reformed Church, he was ready to extend freedom of worship to Catholics on the one hand, and to Anabaptists on the other, for no man ever felt more keenly than he, that the Reformer who becomes in his turn a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Varney with a faint grin. "That chap gets his first lesson in the art of being a reformer to-morrow. Curious, wasn't it?—stumbling right into the heart of the agitation an hour after we hit ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... truth clearly seen in all directions, and thus to round out and perfect a well balanced character. Was not the sum of influence exerted by John Stuart Mill on political, religious and social questions far greater than that of any statesman or reformer who has sedulously limited his sympathies and activities to carrying one specific measure? We have many women abundantly endowed with capabilities to understand and revise what men have thus far written. But they are all suffering ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... 1844, the indefatigable reformer of abuses connected with the treatment of lunatics, Lord Ashley, moved for an Address to the Crown, praying her Majesty to take into consideration the Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy[168] to the Lord Chancellor, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... found Mr. Chauncey, a good and great man, from England, who had known their grandfather, and was an honored friend of the family. The boys loved to hear him talk, and all tea-time listened with interest to the conversation, for Mr. Chauncey was a reformer as well as a famous clergyman, and it was like inspiring music to hear him tell about the world's work, and the brave men and women who were carrying it on. Eager to show that they had, at least, begun, the boys told him about their Lodge, ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... we to condemn Malachy, the possessor of legitimate power, if he saw in that remedy only the ambition of an aspiring family already grown too great? Theirs was in fact the universal struggle of reform and conservatism; the reformer and the heirs of his work were cut off on Clontarf; the abuses of the elective principle continued unrestrained by ancient salutary usage and prejudice, and the land remained a tempting prey to such Adventurers, foreign ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... that's bad! That's bad! I can see I shall have to take you in hand, and commence my work of reform. Oh, I'm a great reformer, a Zwingli and Savonarola in one. I couldn't count the number of people I've led into the right way. It takes some finding, you know. Strait is the gate—damned strait sometimes. A damned tight squeeze...." ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... seen to be of profound importance in the discussion of social reform. No democratic statesman in our time can propose an improvement in the social condition of the people without reference to the land question, and no social reformer of the nineteenth century has had more influence or been more widely read and discussed than Henry George—the exponent of the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as the rule for human things, there will not anywhere be want of work for the reformer; in very few places do human things adhere quite closely to that law! Here was the Papa of Christendom proclaiming that such was actually the case;—whereupon all over Christendom such results as we have seen. The Sicilians, I think, were the first notable body ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... was pure blasphemy to think of it. The Lord held those old Jews in His hand, of course; but as for the election next month, that was quite another thing. If Joel thrust the history out of the touch of common life, the Doctor brought it down, and held it there on trial. To him it was the story of a Reformer who had served his day. Could he serve this day? Could he? The need was desperate. Was there anything in this Christianity, freed from bigotry, to work out the awful problem which the ages had left for America to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... secure honest elections," says a well-meaning reformer, "is the Clifford or the Myers voting machine." Why, truly, here is a hopeful spirit—a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with the conviction that men can be made honest by machinery—that human character is a matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would give something to know ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... taste, and wide admiration, receives some rude shocks from Carlyle's treatment of humanity, as Dr. Garnett has well shown in his excellent biography of Carlyle; indeed it has led with some to the parting of the ways. For the hopes and inspirations of poet, reformer, teacher, became in great part to him as "the idle chatter of apes" and "the talk ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne

... man who hated inactivity; he was never happy except he was in motion, and never contented unless he had a prospect of change before him. Born in England, he would have been a universal philanthropist or a radical reformer, or an inventor of patent machines, or, in late days, a railroad projector; he would have employed his time in haranguing popular assemblies on the rights of man, and the freedom of religion, and he would have been a loud advocate of the ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... "Literaturbriefe," professedly as a specimen of one of the old popular dramas, despised at that time by the higher classes, though Lessing remarks,—"How fond was Germany once of its Dr. Faustus,—and is so, partly, still!" But even this bold reformer of German taste seems not to have had the temerity to come forward at once as the author of a conception so entirely contrary to the reigning rules and the Frenchified taste by which, at the period of the "Literaturbriefe," (1759-1763,) Germany ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... interpreted them with a sympathy which was no less an intuition of their truth than a reflection of his own genius upon them. We are enabled in some measure to judge of this by a paper entitled 'Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine', written by Dr. Edward Berdoe for the Browning Society, and read at its October meeting in 1888; and in the difficulty which exists for most of us of verifying the historical data of Mr. Browning's poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as well as an ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... hangs an old crucifix. For that is Armand De Rance, glorious sinner, handsomest, wealthiest, most gifted man of his day—and his a day of glorious men; and this is Armand De Rance, become the sad austere reformer of La Trappe. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... upon its own principle; the whole is so frittered down, and disjointed, that scarcely a trace of the original scheme remains! Thus, between the resistance of power, and the unsystematical process of popularity, the undertaker and the undertaking are both exposed, and the poor reformer is hissed off the stage both ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... important English poet of the period between Pope and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, which arose out of the intellectual ferment of the European Revolution. As a reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to nature, and at the same time as the teacher of a new school of sentiment which acted as a solvent upon the existing moral and social system, he may perhaps himself be numbered among the precursors of the revolution, though he was certainly ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... the identity of the god of creation and the God of redemption. A new reformation was therefore necessary. Marcion felt himself entrusted with this commission, and the church which he gathered recognised this vocation of his to be the reformer.[399] He did not appeal to a new revelation such as he presupposed for Paul. As the Pauline Epistles and an authentic [Greek: euangelion kuriou] were in existence, it was only necessary to purify these from interpolations, and restore the genuine Paulinism which was just the Gospel ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... to see in the Seat of Peter a reformer, who should have courage to apply surgery to the festering wounds of the Church. She had her desire; Urban began at once a drastic policy of Church reform. But his domineering asperity proved unbearable to the College of Cardinals, and schism broke ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... weeds. It startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy. She made no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering them as with a breeze from her fan. A female reformer, in her attacks upon society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined to aim directly at that spot. Especially the relation between the sexes is naturally among the earliest to ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a reformer. A reformer is one who re-crystallizes the social ideals of man, who breaks up idols and bad customs, and sweeps away abuses. But we must first ask: What is an idol? What is a bad custom? What is an abuse? They are social standards which are out of harmony with true ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... one corner the entire Massachusetts delegation, with the Supreme Bench at their head, appeared to be earnestly advocating the manuring of Iowa waste lands; and to the inexperienced eye, a noted female reformer had apparently appended her signature to a request for a pension for wounds received ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... the unenfranchised as they passed along the road. She was cheered vociferously, and must have felt a thrill of satisfaction at the thought that she was recognised as the worthy representative of that stout old Radical reformer, Sir Francis Burdett. I took up my position to see the procession pass in Pall Mall, opposite the Reform Club. I had never before seen that famous building. It struck me at the time as having a cold and gloomy exterior, yet I gazed upon it with reverence as the home of the most ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.



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