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verb
Reform  v. i.  To return to a good state; to amend or correct one's own character or habits; as, a man of settled habits of vice will seldom reform.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Reform" Quotes from Famous Books



... times that Anthony was not a little depressed. While he was unaware of his grandfather's intentions he presumed that a large part of the money would come to him. A good deal would go in charities, of course; a good deal to carry on the business of reform. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... greatest woman of our times," he said, stepping backward a pace or two and surveying her as if she were a cathedral. "I should never have thought of those ideas. You ought to be a legislator and reform ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... practices, the vices of cloisters, etc. This proved by Experience, who, from a New Testament, shows the office of a bushop. The Man of Armes and the Burges approve of all that was said against the clergy, and alledge the expediency of a reform, with the consent of Parliament. The Bushop dissents. The Man of Armes and the Burges said they were two, and he but one, wherefore their voice should have most effect. Thereafter the King, in the play, ratified, approved, and confirmed all that ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous

... be consistent, don't you? Leave all other mad and wicked people as well. Then you'll find it easier to reform ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... Mr. King was a Reform preacher, and had even come from Washington, District of Columbia, where he had been residing for the last two years, to collect money to build a church which should exclude from membership those who held their fellow-men in bondage, and who would ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen

... only an index to the general ferment, it is also the inspiration, and even the standard, of a young, violent, and fierce generation. It is the most visible and the most successful manifestation of their will, or they think it is. Political reform, social reform, literature even, move slowly, ankle-deep in the mud of materialism and deliquescent tradition. Though not without reason Socialists claim that Liberals ride their horses, the jockeys still wear blue and ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... them to tell when occasion arises; they are plausible and consistent, but we know where to have them; otherwise, if they were liable, like self-deceivers, to spring mines upon us in unexpected places, man would soon make it his business to reform them—not from within, but ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... before him, and doubtful of success. Mansfield was neither; at any rate, as far as any one else could see. He set himself up neither for a Hercules nor a Galahad. It never occurred to him what he was. But it did occur to him that Templeton wanted reform, and that the Captain of Templeton ought to reform it. And with that one clear purpose before him, Mansfield was the sort of fellow to go straight through thick and thin to reach it, or perish ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed

... the world has ever known.] The chain which bound provincial China to the metropolitan government was therefore in the last analysis finance and nothing but finance; and if the system broke down in 1911 it was because financial reform—to discount the new forces of which the steam engine was the symbol—had been attempted, like military reform, both too late and in the wrong way, and instead of strengthening, had vastly weakened the authority ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... so totally different from her own. Susan saw that much was wrong at home, and wanted to set it right. That a girl of fourteen, acting only on her own unassisted reason, should err in the method of reform, was not wonderful; and Fanny soon became more disposed to admire the natural light of the mind which could so early distinguish justly, than to censure severely the faults of conduct to which it led. Susan ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... mulberry-trees, which in a single night grew to such a size that they could hardly be spanned by two hands. The Emperor was terrified; whereupon a Minister said, "No prodigy is a match for virtue. Your Majesty's government is no doubt at fault, and some reform of conduct is necessary." Accordingly, the Emperor began to act more circumspectly; after which the mulberry-trees soon withered ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles

... position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July, 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether out of question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx

... some things that I could never have learned in college, 'cause at college you only learn things that have to be verified by actual experience in business. Pa says one year in the circus will be better for me than ten years in a reform school. But I learned something yesterday that made such an impression on me that I will not be able to sit down comfortably ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck

... accentuate this. Surely the people, in England, France, America, Italy, Russia, and among the neutral nations, will strive that no such war may come again. Even in Germany, when the people find out what they have paid and why, inevitably they must struggle so to reform their institutions that no ruler or class may again plunge them into such disaster for the selfish benefit or ambitions of that ruler or class. How our hearts ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs

... subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from one of the three great movements to which we have referred. Was it possible that the woman question should be discussed and woman's political education and marriage should be ventilated when feudalism threatened the throne, when reform menaced both king and barons, and the people, between the hierarchy and the empire, were forgotten? According to a saying of Madame Necker, women, amid these great movements, were like the cotton wool put into a case of porcelain. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... that we are on the eve of a great rebellion. One strong-minded lady who informed me that she had come of a Huguenot stock talked of the Land Leaguers as if they were responsible for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes: but she acknowledged that the land laws were very unjust and needed reform. ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... as people will meet any one who tries to interfere with their cherished notions; but there were others, few though they were, who had the good sense and honesty to own that the young deputy was right, and to join with him in trying to reform the ways of the men in ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn

... spare parts. Obviously one will eliminate (as you were about to write and suggest) the bills and the correspondence, but those, Charles, are the only things that don't occupy room. What else can one eliminate? The only thing is to reform one's life and learn to be a pantechnicon; one may also, with a little ingenuity, use one's clothes to serve a double purpose. I have only got as far as evolving a scheme for tying up all the outlets of my breeches and then filling them with air, so that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various

... and of his son Alexis and his grandson Feodor were to be reigns of preparation and reform. Of course there were turbulent uprisings and foreign wars, and perils on the frontiers near the Baltic and the Black seas. But Russia was gaining in ascendency while Poland, from whom she had narrowly escaped, was fast declining. The European rulers began to see advantages for ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... three of you to reform me," he said with a little laugh. "Mother has tried her hand at it, and good old Ellen, and now you have put on the finishing touch. At least, I hope it's the finishing touch," ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick

... the office all the morning drawing up instructions for Portsmouth yard in those things wherein we at our late being there did think fit to reform, and got them signed this morning to send away to-night, the Duke being now there. At noon to the Wardrobe; there dined. My Lady told me how my Lady Castlemaine do speak of going to lie in at Hampton Court; which she and all our ladies are much ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... question of certain further measures of factory reform. A group of labour leaders were pressing upon the public and the Government a proposal to pass a special Factory Act for certain districts and trades of East London. In spite of Commissions, in spite of recent laws, "sweating," ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... that keeps you guessing to the very end, and never attempts to instruct or reform you. It is a strictly up-to-date story of love and mystery with wireless telegraphy and all the modern improvements. The events nearly all take place on a big Atlantic liner and the romance of the deep is skilfully ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... been deceived while under the influence of wine, and remembering the total loss of consciousness that is one of the terrible consequences of drink, and beholding too before him the handsome Kacha whom he had, in a state of unconsciousness, drunk with his wine, then thought of effecting a reform in the manners of Brahmanas. The high-souled Usanas rising up from the ground in anger, then spoke as follows: "The wretched Brahmana who from this day, unable to resist the temptation, will drink wine shall be regarded as having lost his virtue, shall ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... baffle reform, In the sacred name of law; And over the quavering voice of Hem, Is the droning ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... friend," he said earnestly, "I don't say for a minute that our system doesn't cause a great deal of quite unnecessary suffering; I don't say that it doesn't need reform. Most lawyers and almost any thinking man will tell you that it does. But that's a wide question which doesn't help us here. We'll manage your business for you, if it can be done. You've made a bad start, that's all. The first thing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... against him in another. For one thing Russia was becoming transfigured. The dry bones of the nation which the Germans often declared was good only as ethnic manure had had life and a soul breathed into them by the great agrarian reform of which the credit belongs to Witte and Stolypin. The latter statesman in a series of conversations had in 1906 opened his mind to me on the subject, and frankly avowed that the Government, having gone astray in its estimate of the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... things, and yet doing the same things, is a doubtful speculation. It is not founding society on a communion, or even on a convention, but rather on a coincidence. Four men may meet under the same lamp post; one to paint it pea green as part of a great municipal reform; one to read his breviary in the light of it; one to embrace it with accidental ardour in a fit of alcoholic enthusiasm; and the last merely because the pea green post is a conspicuous point of rendezvous with his young lady. But ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... Johnson's division (14th Corps),—with a double line of skirmishers thrown out, followed in easy supporting distance by the whole force, and carry the rifle pits at the foot of Missionary Ridge, and when carried to reform his lines in the rifle pits with a view to carrying the ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat

... Manchester, began business as partners in the affiliated firms of John Bright and Brothers, cotton spinners and manufacturers, Rochdale, and Bright and Co., carpet manufacturers, Rochdale and Manchester. At an early age Mr. Bright showed a keen interest in politics, and took part in the Reform agitation of 1831-32. In those days every householder was compelled by law to pay the Church-rates levied in his parish, whatever his religious creed might be, and it is said that Mr. Bright's first flights of ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... the day her husband would be released. He complied; found a prepossessing and cultivated man; and upon telling him how earnestly his wife and himself had prayed for him, was rejoiced to learn that in that lonesome cell the Spirit of God had visited him, filled him with a sincere wish to reform the future and redeem the past. The missionary called again and again, and witnessed the strong determination of the young man to fight against his pernicious habit. He was soon employed again in a large house, became a regular ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of the mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed. Upon the whole, there was in this man something that would create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder; something to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish, or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world, that should resound ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... take to reform him?" asked Phil, laughing; but Katherine could only shake her head and say she ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant

... safe with a purse of gold in its hand. He said that as he himself could not have a finger in the pie, he would take care nobody else should. And yet he was not one bloody justice either; never hanged thief without giving him a chance to reform; but when he found him quite hardened he would say: 'Hang up de rogue!' Oh, Tom was not a very hard man, and had one grateful heart for any old kindness which had been sewn him. One day as Tom sat on de ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... agonistic elements seem to have contended in the man, sometimes pulling him different ways like wild horses. He was a cautious, conservative Scotchman, fully aware what a foetid gas-bag much of modern radicalism is; but then his great heart demanded reform, demanded change—often terribly at odds with his scornful brain. No author ever put so much wailing and despair into his books, sometimes palpable, oftener latent. He reminds me of that passage in Young's poems where as death presses closer and closer for his prey, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... under the circumstances, wise to nominate Mr. Blaine, either in 1876 or later. I believed then, and now believe, that he would have been an admirable President of the United States. But I did not think it wise to put at the head of a movement for reform and for purity of administration, a man whose supporters must defend him against such charges, and who must admit that he had most unwisely of his own accord put himself into a position where such charges were not only possible, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... Protector and his Council, and also of the Acts of the Barebones Parliament; and they proposed Bills of their own to supersede some of these,—especially a new Bill for the Ejection of Scandalous Ministers, and a new Bill for Reform of the Court of Chancery. But of all the incidental work undertaken by this Parliament none seems to have been undertaken with so much gusto as that which consisted in efforts for the suppression of Heresy and Blasphemy. Here was the natural outcome ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... wretched, terrible years of her married life, she had prayed and hoped for deliverance from the earthly hell in which she and her children lived. The week before Adjutant Lee's visit she had in desperation gone to a spiritual leader and implored him to try and reform her husband, and had received the extraordinary reply, 'Well, you must bear with this little habit. I may tell you I have ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter

... unlikely for the great task as he was, and as entirely severed from all existing organisations. Catherine Mumford, like himself, innocent of any unkind feeling towards her Church, had been excluded from it, simply because she would not pledge herself to keep entirely away from the Reform party. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton

... was progress in other respects. During the "great peace," first arose great scholars. Culture became more general throughout the nation. Education was esteemed. The corrupt lives of the priests were condemned and an effort was made to reform life through the revival of a certain school of Confucian teachers known as "Shin-Gaku"—"Heart-Knowledge." Art also made progress, both pictorial and manual. It would almost seem as if modern artificers and painters had lost the skill of their forefathers ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... the aim of God to "get even;" love is higher than law and in His wonderful mercy and solicitude for our welfare He has opened the way of repentance and reform whereby we may obtain forgiveness of sin, as taught by the Lord of Love: the Christ. Not indeed contrary to law, for His laws are immutable, but by application of a higher law, whereby we accomplish here that which would otherwise ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... compels us to make before we quit the present subject, namely, that, whatever opinion may be entertained of the dispositions of the British government, during the ten years following the passing of the Reform Bill, towards the English Church, for one fact every member of that church must feel deeply indebted to them. During the time of Lord Grey's and Lord Melbourne's holding office, no less than six new bishoprics were erected in the British colonies, and the first impulse was encouraged of that ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... to that barn and pitch down the hay you were supposed to do this afternoon or you'll go back to the poorhouse. You can take your choice. The county has a place for incorrigible boys, and if you go far enough you'll land in the reform school. Are you going out to the barn ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson

... 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 rather ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... of punishment is higher still. Jennie is punished in order to reform her. In the previous examples the act was all-important. Now Jennie and her moral condition come into the foreground. None of the younger children take the trouble to explain to Jennie why it was wrong ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... Agnew. I have given you chance after chance to reform and change about. You get worse. You are a disgrace to humanity, to say nothing of Yale College. You struck at Badger to-day, as ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish

... one that doth not only pretend to reform, but effects it amongst People of any Sense; makes me (who are one of the greatest of your Admirers) give you this Trouble to desire you will settle the Method of us Females knowing when one another is in Town: For they have now got a Trick of never sending to their Acquaintance ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... really loves a woman he is always right to marry her. Why should we suppose that a woman may not reform—that true love may not raise her? I was talking to a novelist the other day; he told me thestory of a book he is writing. It is about a woman who leaves the husband she has never loved for the man she adores; she goes away with him, he marries her, and she sinks lower and ...
— Spring Days • George Moore

... book on the relations between the king and court and the tax-paying masses and was disgraced forever after, dying within a few months of a broken heart that he should have been so impotent in attempting to bring about a reform. ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... sister as children of the same mother, they are met by the obvious objection that no revolution in a promiscuous group would result in the marriage of children of the same mother. Ex hypothesi there were several child-bearing women in the group, and their children, if a reform were introduced prohibiting marriage outside one's own generation, would intermarry; but the children of these women are, on the definition adopted, ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... have rightly seized and comprehended what alone seems to me worthy of will and execution. There shall be but one law for the high and the low, the poor and the rich. The distinguished Chancellor Carmer shall immediately go to work upon it, and you shall aid him. The necessity of such a reform we have lately felt in the Arnold process, where the judge decided in favor of the rich, and wronged the poor man. How could the judge sustain Count Schmettau against the miller Arnold, who had been deprived of the water for his mill, when it ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... chief usurpations of the papacy; he leaves it to Christian princes to join together to vindicate their own rights, and reduce the Pope ad Canones, to that temper, which the ancient canons allow and require of him; and if that will not be done, to reform every one in ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler

... sympathy with and comprehension of the tenets of the heretics which were creeping into some enlightened minds. He had imbibed some new and enlightened views from stanch sons of the Church, who were themselves preaching the doctrine of internal reform, but he went no further in these matters than his teachers. The very name of heresy was odious to him, but none the less did it go sorely against the grain to be a slave to the haughty Prior of Chadwater, and at his bidding to violate (as it seemed ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green

... other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers, quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his nation. His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d'Herbois, and other wicked offsprings of rebellion. With all other terrorists, he was imprisoned for some time after the death of Robespierre; ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... very good serious, ladies, I will have this order revers'd, the presence must be better maintain'd from you: a quarter past eleven, and ne'er a nymph in prospective! Beshrew my hand, there must be a reform'd discipline. Is that your new ruff, sweet lady-bird? By my troth, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson

... I'll see that he gets the heaviest sentence the law allows, while if you or your children make any further trouble, I'll meet you promptly in every way the law permits. But, little as you deserve it, I am going to give you and your family one chance to reform, before proceeding against you. Only understand one thing, I am not afraid of you. I've had ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe

... are always whining for more than their allotted $7 a week. The President of the great railroad corporation, in the very middle of a growling fit over the extra cost involved in purchasing his last Legislature, (owing to the fact that some of its Members had been elected upon a fusion of Radical-Reform and Honest-Workingman's Tickets,) is suddenly and mysteriously impressed with the recollection that this is Christmas Eve. "Why, bless my soul, so it is!" he cries, springing up from his littered rosewood desk like a boy. "Here, you General Superintendent ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various

... sung, the halting and freezing impression of whole, long passages will disappear, and the duration of the performance will be considerably shortened. If cuts were resorted to, you would gain comparatively little time, and would sacrifice to our modern theatrical routine every possibility of thorough reform. I can imagine, for instance, that the speeches of the king and the herald may have made a fatiguing impression, but if this was the case because the singers sang them in a lackadaisical, lazy, and slovenly manner, without ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... although the duration of his life was but fifty-two years. Of these probably the most noteworthy was Gregory XIII (1572-1585), in whose reign occurred the fearful Massacre of St. Bartholomew, August 24, 1572, and the reform of the calendar from that known as the Julian to the new style named the Gregorian Calendar in honor of ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz

... the less merrily in consequence. At all events, the contretemps opened the eyes of the Emperor somewhat to the folly of having high restrictive duties with a frontier so enormous as that of Russia; but, whatever were his plans of reform, the war and death cut them short. Large quantities of tea are at the present time imported into the neighbouring German ports, for the acknowledged object ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... von Baerenklau strive to reform his lines; vainly did those who had rallied round him at his command, make a desperate effort to force their way through the ranks of the infuriated Tyrolese. The fierce bravery of the latter overcame all resistance, and rendered their ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... that Mrs. Leary operated in Chicago, under the guise of a confectionery shop, one of the stations of the underground railroad, and assisted the brotherhood in disposing of their ill-gotten wares. A recent reform wave in Chicago had caused a shake-up in the police department, most disturbing to ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... to him to go into politics and help reform the world by routing a certain Irish boss. He made a speech at a ward meeting, and broke down in the middle of it before the ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis

... he said, "I made a very large sum of money by amalgamating certain shipping interests at a favorable moment. Thus, as it happened, I had at command practically unlimited resources when I was asked to finance the cause of reform in China. The wretched lot of the Chinese Nation had always appealed to my sympathies. Some hundreds of millions of the most industrious and peace-loving people in the world have been exploited for centuries by a predatory caste. Given a chance to expand, freed from the shackles of the ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... to require a surgical operation to get the fact through our thick heads, that our school system demands radical reform from top to bottom to the end that hands as well as heads may receive ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... gay? It may correct a foible, may chastise The freaks of fashion, regulate the dress, Retrench a sword-blade, or displace a patch; But where are its sublimer trophies found? What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaimed By rigour, or whom laughed into reform? Alas, Leviathan is not so tamed. Laughed at, he laughs again; and, stricken hard, Turns to the stroke his adamantine scales, That fear no discipline of ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... eye, indeed, in the hand of God—to whom (in the presence of the company and the waiters), he solemnly appealed. He was of noble, perhaps royal, blood—he had a house at Hampsted—was convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform. His pamphlets had gone through thirty editions, skipping alternately the odd and even numbers. He loved the Constitution, to which he would cling and grapple—and he was clothed with the infirmities of ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... beginning of the present century, not very long before my own time, after many years of moral and intellectual declension, the University of Oxford woke up to a sense of its duties, and began to reform itself, the first instruments of this change, to whose zeal and courage we all owe so much, were naturally thrown together for mutual support, against the numerous obstacles which lay in their path, and soon stood out in relief from the ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... planning a political campaign," replied James. "But if you're proposing to campaign on the platform of a reform in education, I suggest that you educate your henchmen in the rudimentary elements of polite speech and gentle behavior. I dislike being ordered out of my room by usurpers who have the temerity to address ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... won't have such dev'lish bad luck, you know;—the luck must turn: and I'll reform, by Gad, I'll reform. And if you were to split on me, it would cut up my wife so; you know ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... but having a conference also with Lord Fairfax, followed by a visit to his Lordship at his house of Nunappleton. Fairfax had been in arms to attack Lambert's rear, in accordance with the understanding he had come to with Monk; and it was part of Monk's business at York to reform the wreck of Lambert's forces, incorporating some of them with his own and putting the rest under the command of officers who had declared for Fairfax. He arranged also for leaving one of his own regiments at York and for sending Morgan back with two ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... which I gave large fish hooks, which they were verry fond, those Indians are much more reserved and better behaved to day than yesterday- the Sight of our Sentinal who walks on his post, has made this reform in those people who but yesterday was verry impertenant and disagreeable to all- This evening they all Cleared out before the time to Shut the gates, without being derected to doe So- I derected Sinks to be dug and a Sentinal Box which was accomplished one of those Indeans brought ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... with an occasional single day "out-bush"; and when the Maluka in his leisure began to fulfil his long-standing promise of a defence around my garden, Cheon expressed himself well-pleased with his reform. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... village weddings. This is an abuse which, I sincerely hope, Civilization will never reform. Under cover of the noise, Fougas entered into conversation, or thought he did, with his left-hand neighbor. "Clementine!" he said to her. She raised her eyes, and her ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... Constable, a refractory canon of Bridlington, was sent to Guisborough to undergo a course of penance, change of residence being always considered to give an excellent opportunity for thorough reform. However, in this case no good seems to have resulted, for about five years later he was sent back to Bridlington with a worse character than before, and, besides much prayer and humiliation, he was to receive a disciplina every Friday at the hands ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home

... Another reform carried out by Vogel had been the adoption of the Torrens system of land transfer. Henceforth under the Land Transfer Law, Government officers did nearly all the conveyancing business of the Colony. Land titles were investigated, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of Charles James Fox. In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or indifferent. As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury that, in his constitutional theories, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... of religious missions, wished to cover the Morea with Wesleyan tracts, and liberate the country by the agency of the Press. He had imported a converted blacksmith, with a cargo of Bibles, types, and paper, who on 20l. a year, undertook to accomplish the reform. Byron, backed by the good sense of Mavrocordatos, proposed to make cartridges of the tracts, and small shot of the type; he did not think that the turbulent tribes were ripe for freedom of the press, and had begun to regard Republicanism ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... beautiful as he was brave, as good as he was beautiful." Without such a force Caesar foresaw that all his efforts to redress the abuses of the State would be in vain. As Consul he had carried certain small instalments of reform; but they had made him more hated than ever by the classes at whose corruption they were aimed, and might any day be overthrown. And neither Pompey nor Crassus were in any way to be depended upon for his ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... has long been concealed from me; but no more of that. I bound you apprentice to the river, and you must now follow up your apprenticeship; but expect nothing farther from me. You must now work your own way up in the world, and I trust that you will reform and do well. You may return to the lighter until I can procure you a situation in another craft, for I consider it my duty to remove you from the influence of those who have led you astray, and with the old man and his son ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... by them in some "barbarous rite"; Saturday was Sabbath; on Sunday men worked. Lent began, not on Ash Wednesday, but on the Monday following. We have no clearer account of the Culdee peculiarities that St Margaret reformed. The hereditary tenure of benefices by lay protectors she did not reform, but she restored the ruined cells of Iona, and established hospitia for pilgrims. She was decidedly unpopular with her Celtic subjects, who now made a struggle ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... gratification that Congress so kindly responded to the recommendation of my last annual message by affording me sufficient time before the close of their late session for the examination of all the bills presented to me for approval. This change in the practice of Congress has proved to be a wholesome reform. It exerted a beneficial influence on the transaction of legislative business and elicited the general approbation of the country. It enabled Congress to adjourn with that dignity and deliberation so becoming to the representatives of this great Republic, without having crowded into general ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan

... was noble, accomplished, high-placed, but he loved freedom of thought and act. Yet when a deputation of reformers came to him for advice, he said: "It is to be wished, without doubt, that the evil should be cast out of our midst, provided that the good enters. You burn to reform our Church; certainly it needs it; but how can you reform it, deformed as you are? You complain that the monks and priests are buffoons; and you are buffoons; that they are gamblers and drunkards, ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells

... of government, Savonarola felt weary in mind and body; he had never failed to preach incessantly in the cathedral, where he expounded his schemes for reform without abandoning his work as prophet. He broke down, but again took up his burden {47} bravely. Florence was a changed city under his rule. Women clothed themselves in the simplest garb and forsook such ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... Progress of the Collection, that they very often make such Reflections upon each other, and each upon himself, and upon his Actions, as reasonable Beings, who disbelieve not a future State of Rewards and Punishments (and who one day propose to reform) must sometimes make:—One of them actually reforming, and antidoting the Poison which some might otherwise apprehend would be spread by the gayer Pen, and lighter ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson

... wide nor deep, but is past the healing, and the shininess at knees and elbows reflected the light that never was on land or sea, or, at least, ought not to be. He felt a degradation with it all, though it was with him the result of folly, not of fault, and he made a struggle for reform in his finances. He abandoned the cheap room in which he lived, and slept upon the office floor at night, the place in decent weather ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... of the voice by a correct and varied use of the head-tones, and by diligent practice of solfeggio. You must restore the unnaturally extended registers to their proper limits; and you have still other points to reform. Are you not aware that this frequent tremulousness of the voice, this immoderate forcing of its compass, by which the chest-register is made to interfere with the head-tones, this coquetting with the deep chest-tones, this affected, offensive, and almost inaudible nasal ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck

... acquired during the solitude of the first years of his childhood. This excellent woman first made him familiar with the maternal feminine solicitude, closer observation of which afterwards led him, as well as Pestalozzi, to a reform of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... slim waist and curtseying grotesquely before him, she said: "'Lige Curtis! Oh, yes! 'Lige Curtis, who swore to do everything for me! 'Lige Curtis, who promised to give up liquor for me,—who was to leave Tasajara for me! 'Lige Curtis, who was to reform, and keep his land as a nest-egg for us both in the future, and then who sold it—and himself—and me—to dad for a glass of whiskey! 'Lige Curtis, who disappeared, and then let us think he was dead, only that he might attack us out of ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... appeal to them more than pills and tonics, they reform and write stories. They have to!" he cried, suddenly in earnest, "When one is ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... father, with melancholy sternness,—"What sort of life has it been?—Your soul! alas! what regard have you ever paid to it? Take care to reform both ere offering either as pledges ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... both the deceiver as well as the deceived shall be damned to the day of Rasta Khez.... There is no saviour. In the other world you shall receive the return according to your actions.... Your saviour is your deeds, and God himself. He is the pardoner and the giver. If you repent your sins and reform, and if the Great Judge consider you worthy of pardon, or would be merciful to you, He alone can and will ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... majority of people do not possess teeth like the monkey, and to these I can only suggest that they macerate their nuts in a nut butter machine. There are several of these machines on the market, and they are stocked by all large "Food-Reform" provision dealers. They cost anything from six or seven shillings. The daily allowance of nuts may be thoroughly macerated and eaten with fruit in the place of cream. Ordinary people may use a nut-mill, which flakes, not macerates, the nuts. But people with bad teeth and a ...
— Food Remedies - Facts About Foods And Their Medicinal Uses • Florence Daniel

... to wink at the license. Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and, consequently, though intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like, among low people, it is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It seems to me that in Venetian society the reform must begin, not with dissolute life, but with the social toleration of the impure, and with the wanton habits of scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny to virtue ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... and file, and formed them into a body of infantry, whose solid masses were calculated to withstand the furious onset of the Hungarian horse. These garrisons were solely composed of the ancient freemen, and the whole measure was, in fact, merely a reform of the ancient arrier-ban, which no longer sufficed for the protection of the State, and whose deficiency had long been supplied by the addition of vassals under the command of their temporal or spiritual ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... resulted in the indictments. Like Jeremy Collier before him and Arthur Bedford in 'The Evil and Danger of Stage-Plays' later (1706), he adds similar expressions from plays recently acted, as proof, presumably, of the failure of the theaters to reform themselves in spite of the publicity previously given to their shortcomings. In so doing, he damns the stage and plays by excerpts, usually brief ones, containing objectionable phrases. To this material he adds ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous

... 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 to the pleasure of the English. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... education. In 1638 the Swedish Government, at the head of which, during the minority of Queen Christina, was the Chancellor Oxenstiern, invited Comenius to Sweden, that he might preside over a Commission for the revision and reform of the schools there. Comenius, however, declined the invitation, recommending that the work should be entrusted to some native Swede, but promising to give his advice; and, at the same time (1638), he began to translate into Latin, for the behoof of Sweden and of other countries, a ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... The oil-rich Nigerian economy, long hobbled by political instability, corruption, and poor macroeconomic management, is undergoing substantial economic reform under the new civilian administration. Nigeria's former military rulers failed to diversify the economy away from overdependence on the capital-intensive oil sector, which provides 20% of GDP, 95% of foreign exchange earnings, ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... 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 have been a ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes



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