Pragmatist Quotes & Sayings

I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but I always take realities of today, lessons from the distant and recent past into consideration. — Vladimir Putin

Behind every footballing tough guy there lurks a mincing aesthete with a love of art for art's sake, football for football's sake. A win without art is somehow less than a victory; less, almost, than a beautiful defeat. In football, the romantic and the pragmatist are ever at war in the same breast. Beauty, it must be understood here, is not Barcelona's aim but their method. And last night they were ready to use this method at every opportunity - quick-fire passing of wit and purpose in the danger areas, seeking always to produce an unlooked-for player in a position of threat. — Simon Barnes

I'm a pragmatist. — Richard Sherman

Koizumi was not rooted in Japan's rightwing nationalist tradition: he was a pragmatist and a populist. Abe, in contrast, is a rightwing nationalist. Unlike Koizumi, for example, he has questioned the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials of Japan's wartime leaders, which found many of them guilty of war crimes. — Martin Jacques

As a rationalist, pragmatist, and a scientist I rarely involve myself in the cosmological arguments of the creation of the universe. — Debasish Mridha

To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, What would the world be like if it were true? The operationist asks, What would we have to do to come to believe it? For the pragmatist the question is, What would we do if did believe it? — Abraham Kaplan

For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use. — Philip Kitcher

The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty. — Charles Sanders Peirce

I have great respect for Sandra Day O'Connor. She has broken so many barriers for women in the law, and was a master negotiator and pragmatist in her days on the Supreme Court. — Kyrsten Sinema

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. — William James

Like Dvoretsky, I think that (all other things being equal), the analytical method of studying chess must give you a colossal advantage over the chess pragmatist, and that there can be no certainty in chess without analysis. I personally acquired these views from my sessions with Mikhail Botvinnik, and they laid the foundations of my chess-playing life. — Garry Kasparov

Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic. — Debasish Mridha

The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic. — Stephen King

My only definition is that I am a pragmatist. — Enrique Pena Nieto

I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist. — Will Self

Dynamic equivalence is a central concept in the translation theory, developed by Eugene A. Nida, which has been widely adopted by the United Bible Societies...Purporting to be an academically linguistic concept, it is in fact a sociocultural concept of communication. Its definition is essentially behavourist: determined by external forces, such as society--with strong pragmatist overtones--focusing on the reader rather than the writer. [M]ost twentieth-century American philosophical endeavours are predominantly pragmatist, dwelling in the shadows cast by William James and John Dewey. — J. Cammenga

All of Robert Caro's biographies are exceptional, in part because of Caro's fundamental ambivalence about power. He sees its necessity and use for getting things done, even as he is often repelled by watching power at close range. His masterpiece on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, describes the evolution of Moses from idealist to pragmatist as he became one of the most powerful figures in the 20th century. — Jeffrey Pfeffer

As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation. — Stacy Schiff

If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair
well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there. — Walter Lippmann

If moral values amount to nothing but subjective phenomena of the human mind without independent meaning and existence - a position held by a variety of naturalist, positivist, and pragmatist philosophers - one never can be found lacking in light of an objective standard of moral values. — Reinhard Hutter

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us. — Mark Kurlansky

David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic. — Geraldine Brooks

Only a coward captures men the way you did."
"A coward? Or a pragmatist? — Sarah J. Maas

A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. — William James

I use that as my responsibility on the show, to be the pragmatist. — Fisher Stevens

Despite appearances I'm not a cynic. I'm a sarcastic pragmatist. — Stephen B5 Jones

I don't take myself that seriously. I'm a pragmatist. — Guy Kawasaki

Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. — G.K. Chesterton

Pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm. — Jane Fonda

I'm a kindhearted but highly competitive pragmatist. When I seek to win something, I always make certain it's never at the expense of anything more serious than the inadequate efforts of others. — Jonathan Kieran

I'm a pragmatist. I think, as a woman, you have to be more careful. You have to be more communal, you have to say yes to more things than men, you have to worry about things that men don't have to worry about. But once we get enough women into leadership, we can break stereotypes down. If you lead, you get to decide. — Sheryl Sandberg

I'm not sure if President Obama is an ideologue or a pragmatist. I am hoping and praying he's a pragmatist. — Rudy Giuliani

Tell me about Gang Starr,' said Nishant, in an effort to start a conversation I'd be interested in.
'One MC, one DJ ... '
'Classic combo,' Anand affirmed.
'No hype man?'
'No.'
'What do we need Anand for?' Nishant shrugged, ever the pragmatist, never the catcher of feelings. — Nikesh Shukla

I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism. — Vernon A. Walters

President Obama is perhaps the most ideologically-motivated president in American history. But according to the ultimate authority, Barack Obama, he's a mere pragmatist. — Ben Shapiro

It's a pragmatist's business, comedy. Start off with good intentions and references to the Pompidou Centre and you end up with boiled sweets and a pantomime cow. — Mel Smith

The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position. — Alan Watts

This is very nice, cozy. You got a nice cozy place, Lublin."
"Cramped," Rosa said.
"I work from a different theory. For everything, there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you go along better."
"I don't like to give myself lies," Rosa said.
"Life is short, we all got to lie. — Cynthia Ozick

Her predicament (the word she had come to prefer in her mind, rather than "circumstances") had turned her into quite a philosopher, when by nature she'd always been a pragmatist. For instance, one allegedly wasn't rewarded for all of the good one did until on departed the Earthly Plane. But if you committed one (albeit epic) transgression, a lifetime of damnation seemed required. — Julie Anne Long

Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity. — Eugene Jarecki

Eventually a guy behind the hog farmer broke ranks, and stepped forward. A pragmatist, clearly. He walked to the car and lifted the hatchback and put the bags inside, one by one, first Keever's, then Chang's. — Lee Child

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors
psychology, sociology, women's studies
to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view. — P. J. O'Rourke

I'm not a Pollyanna; I'm a pragmatist. — Laura Lang

If I sound as if I'm always predicting ominous things, it's because I'm a pragmatist. I use deductive reasoning to generalize, and I suppose this sometimes ends up sounding like unlucky prophecies. You know why? Because reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. You have to only open a newspaper on any given day and weigh the good news versus the bad, and you'll see what I mean. — Haruki Murakami

Generally speaking, followers will not commit themselves for very long to a leader who is not also a pragmatist. As most of us have discovered, dreams are only powerful when we believe they can come true. Pipe dreams belong in the realm of fantasy; leaders' dreams belong in the realm of possibility. — Marlene Caroselli

No more verbally incomprehensible no more devoid of the vision thing and no more the cautious pragmatist proudly displaying the virtues of tradition and the advantages of biological seniority. — Bob Dole

For pragmatist philosophers such as these, a belief is valued as true because it is useful, because it works, because it brings tangible benefits to human beings and other creatures. Siddhattha Gotama's Four Noble Truths are "true" not because they correspond to something real somewhere, but because, when put into practice, they can enhance the quality of your life. In — Stephen Batchelor

Somebody who sticks to his guns can be called a stubborn person or a principled person, it depends on whether you like his ideas or not. You can call somebody whose ideas you don't like an ideologist or a person of ideas. You can call somebody whose actions you don't like a pragmatist if you like them, or an opportunist if you don't. — Richard Pipes