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

  William James

  Happiness, Fear, Stress

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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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• 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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• 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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• Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fighting, Past, Asceticism

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• 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

  Leadership, Dream, Powerful

  Marlene Caroselli, William J. Rothwell, Dale C. Brandenburg (1990). “The Language of leadership”, Center for Professional development

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• 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

  Past, Reality, Perspective

  Source: www.profitmagazin.com

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• You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

  Richard Rorty

  Plato, Philosophical, Giving

  Interview with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, believermag.com. June 1, 2003.

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• 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

  Gun, Ideas, Stubborn

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• Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

  Adam Phillips

  Hero, Mean, Ends

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• A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Reality, Results, Concerned

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• 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

  Powerful, Use, Fundamentals

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• 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

  Issues, Important, Purpose

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

  Robert Hass

  Philosophical, Thinking, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Vision, Tradition, Virtue

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• I use that as my responsibility on the show, to be the pragmatist.

  Fisher Stevens

  Responsibility, Use, Shows

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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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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• 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

  Christian, Baby, Hate

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer”, p.21, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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