Visionaries light the way. Pragmatists lead the way.

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

— Jane Fonda

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes…

— William James

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

— Christopher Lasch

Generally speaking, followers will not commit themselves for very long to a leader who is not also a pragmatist. As most of us have…

— Marlene Caroselli

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

— Alan Perlis

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism;…

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but I always…

— Vladimir Putin

For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually…

— Philip Kitcher

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…

— Alan Watts

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain…

— Brian Ferneyhough

Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the supremacy of…

— Peter Padfield

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.…

— Will Self

To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, What would the world be like if it were true? The operationist…

— Abraham Kaplan

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

— Nitin Nohria

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also…

— Mark Kurlansky