Pragmatists Quotes

• Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

  Alan Perlis

  Life And Love, Suffering, Genius

  "Epigrams on Programming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9), pp. 7-13, pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de. September 1982.

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  The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

  William James

  Happiness, Fear, Stress

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• Great leaders are pragmatists who can deal with difficult realities but still have the optimism and courage to act.

  Nitin Nohria

  Reality, Optimism, Leader

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• Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

  Alan Perlis

  Simplicity, Simple Life, Doe

  "Epigrams on Programming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9), pp. 7-13, pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de. September 1982.

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• Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles.

  Bill Watterson

  People, Choices, Principles

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• 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

  Men, Cockroaches, Doe

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• 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

  Principles, Adequacy, Facts

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  The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

  William James

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

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• 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

  Sweet, Cows, Comedy

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• pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm.

  Jane Fonda

  Enthusiasm

  Jane Fonda (2006). “My Life So Far”, Ebury Press

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

  Rudy Giuliani

  President, Praying, Ideologues

  "Rudy Giuliani's Take on Closing Guantanamo Bay". "The Hannity Show", www.foxnews.com. January 26, 2009.

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• Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the supremacy of maritime over territorial power. Pragmatists may deplore this as crude determinism, as another vain attempt to construct a general theory of history. They should reflect on the sort of political philosophy and structures we might now adhere to had the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Bonaparte, Hitler, Stalin or his heirs prevailed in the titanic world struggles of the past four centuries.

  Peter Padfield

  Philosophy, Struggle, Past

  Peter Padfield (2000). “Maritime Supremacy & the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World”, Overlook Books

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• 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

  Morning, Philosophy, Boys

  Walter Lippmann, Julien C. Sprott (2015). “Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest”, p.145, University of Wisconsin Pres

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• 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

  Cockroaches, Doe, Appeals

  Mark Kurlansky (2011). “Cod”, p.204, Random House

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• I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Philosophy, Students, Youth

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• The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Art, Math, Doubt

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• Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn't start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes brought in extra revenue. The success of his and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's experiment with rate cuts has been obscured by our modern history books.

  Amity Shlaes

  Book, Cutting, Sometimes

  Source: www.ruthfullyyours.com

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• 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

  Business, Philosophy, Positive Thinking

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• 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

  Beautiful, Soccer, Football

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• 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

  Believe, World, Logical

  "The Conduct of Inquiry" by Abraham Kaplan, (p. 53), 1964.

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• 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

  Thinking, Views, Giving

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• 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

  Eight, Views, Years

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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

  Thinking, Misreading, Theist

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism.

  Vernon A. Walters

  Idealism, Describe Myself

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• Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes.

  Christopher Lasch

  Issues, Purpose, Manipulation

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