Quotes About Pragmatism

When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be "reconstructed" according to the pragmatist image of man.

When the Americans flocked to pragmatism, they believed that they were joining a battle to advance their essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves.

The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, and everything else is just theory.

Some people are just like that, Abigail. If it's good for them, then it's good. If it's bad for them, then it's bad. They rearrange morality to suit their ambitions. Nat simply

In the long run, pragmatism doesn't work. Focusing on the GDP alone is bad for the GDP. It does not profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul, and there is an additional sting when he then loses the world too. Whatever you worship in place of God is another thing you lose. Whatever you surrender gladly to Him is returned to you, pressed down, shaken, and running over.

Well, purity - there's no purity in politics.

A choice between killing and dying is no choice at all. You have to be realistic about these things. b

I am not the kind of leader who pontificates about what should be done - I don't operate on scenarios, and I am not a prophet.

it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse

The world belongs to those who don't feel. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of sensibility.

I'm a person who thinks realistically but has dreams and fantasies as well.

A close friend of mine described me as a radical pragmatist. I embrace this no-nonsense distinction wholeheartedly. It is a character trait that matches the sense of myself I've had from as far back as I can remember. I am not one who goes in much for magical thinking. I don't believe in destiny, fate, or things like divine guidance, either.

The standard by which we will be judged and by which we should evaluate ourselves is not the pragmatic standard of the world. Being church and being disciples of Christ is not like driving a Plymouth to Dallas. While the world should look upon Jesus's life and ministry as failures and what he calls us to be as foolish, futile, and contrary to our nature, the Word teaches the church a new meaning of success and calls us to follow him.

If behaving as thought we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

Progress must not become progressivism, where success is measured only by achieving pragmatic results.

One must take the world as one finds it.

He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been.

Nothing but a drizzle. The sun can't always shine. You have to be realistic!

The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

The successful people of this world take life as it comes. They just go out and deal with the world as it is.

People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)

The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it.

Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

Well, purity - there's no purity in politics.