Quotes About Pragmatism

His ideal meeting was thirty seconds long: What's the problem? I see and what possible solutions are there? Okay, I like the sound of the third option, what are the pros and cons? Good. Make it happen.

I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up.

Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic.

It was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is seeking power. The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing.

Custom adapts itself to expediency.

Pragmatism was a sword that cut through such knots; an action was to be judged by its consequences alone.

I remember meeting my manager Eamonn for the very first time, and one of the first things he said to me was, 'You're fat. The first thing you need to go is get to a gym.' It was quite a wake-up call. I got a bit angry initially, like, 'The cheek of him', but I'm quite a pragmatic and thick-skinned person, so I just went ahead and joined the gym.

Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

The true Christian must be both an idealist and a realist. We must have dreams and visions for better things in the future because that is what faith demands. However at the same time, we cannot ignore the reality of what is taking place right now. The key is not to let what you see now steal what you believe for the future.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

First grub, then ethics." He was implying that ethical decision-making may only be a luxury reserved for those of us who do not need to struggle simply to stay alive.

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don't matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient.

I don't ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I'm not a romantic really.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

After a quarter of a century in politics, Roosevelt observed, he had found that change was realized by "men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.

Whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.

Truth is seldom romantic.

The world was amoral. To be idealistic was to ask to be blindsided,

Her situational training emphasised immediate practicalities: what it took to remain alive for the next minute, and the minute after that, rather than concerning herself with ten minutes or an hour from now. It was hard-won pragmatism, distilled from hundreds of real-world scenarios faced by earlier generations of prefects. The lesson was that it worked—most of the time.

I tend to not wallow too much in sentiment if I can avoid it.

Idealism is no good. Any concrete dedication to an abstract condition results in unpleasant things like wars.

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.

Conservatives are wary of change. We have respect for things that have lasted a long time and have been proved to work. When things need changing, we should make the changes with respect to all the reasons why those things worked originally as well as the reasons why amendment is necessary.