Quotes About Pragmatism

I'm not pro-fracking. But sometimes there's got to be some pragmatism.

I cannot revere compromise; I cannot revere pragmatism; I long for ideologues.

One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism.

I'm well aware of the pragmatism of politics.

Pragmatism and romance are sort of opposites.

In the end, pragmatism requires a workable compromise. But none exists on Brexit.

Our platform is crafted by Democrats but it is not about partisanship, its about pragmatism.

Pragmatism is not always a good thing. Experience is not always a good thing.

I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.

Only an ideologue deals with the world as he would wish it to be, as opposed to the world as it is.

I'm not deeply ideologically driven. I believe in good center-right politics.

My only definition is that I am a pragmatist.

If there's one thing I'm not going to apologise for as the leader of the Liberal Democrats in government after 60 or 70 years of being out of government, it's that you just cannot avoid but deal with the world the way it is.

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

like interviewing a new cleaner. Do you want someone who can give you the history of cleaning and the theory of cleaning, or do you want someone who'll just get down and clean your fucking house? They chose you because they think you'll clean their fucking house.

Pragmatism is nothing without imagination; and imagination is wasted without pragmatism

the world had to be faced as it was, not as you wished it to be

You tell me I have to crush a field of babies to keep breathing? Sure. You say people who rely on me aren't going to live unless I turn someone's head into a bowl of gravy? I'm there. I don't feel bad about it. I don't think about it. It just is what it is. It's survival.

First and foremost a pragmatist, he had no time for the interference of unnecessary standards.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best

Today's ideology masquerades as pragmatism with that pragmatism reduced to the simplistic assumption that the basis of human nature is self-interest, a view which discount philanthropy, discredits altruism, with the only motive deserving of trust self-promotion and self-advancement. This so-called pragmatism is wicked and it is doubly so because it is held up as being both realistic and a virtue. Whereas it is shallow, shabby and all too often callous.

it was disbelief in the universality of moral truth, and the failure to see that human beings are by nature capable of gaining access to moral truth, that created the intellectual perversions of pragmatism and positivism alike.