The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and… — William James Copy Share Image
Most women are pragmatists who have allowed extremists on the left and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes. — Christopher Lasch Copy Share Image
Generally speaking, followers will not commit themselves for very long to a leader who is not also a pragmatist. As most of… — Marlene Caroselli Copy Share Image
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. — Alan Perlis Copy Share Image
Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but… — Vladimir Putin Copy Share Image
For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist,… — Alan Watts Copy Share Image
Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the… — Peter Padfield Copy Share Image
I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like… — Will Self Copy Share Image
To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, What would the world be like if it were true?… — Abraham Kaplan Copy Share Image
Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But… — Mark Kurlansky Copy Share Image
It's a pragmatist's business, comedy. Start off with good intentions and references to the Pompidou Centre and you end up with boiled… — Mel Smith Copy Share Image
Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not… — Mark Kurlansky Copy Share Image
Behind every footballing tough guy there lurks a mincing aesthete with a love of art for art's sake, football for football's sake.… — Simon Barnes Copy Share Image
You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin… — Richard Rorty Copy Share Image
Somebody who sticks to his guns can be called a stubborn person or a principled person, it depends on whether you like… — Richard Pipes Copy Share Image
If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock… — Walter Lippmann Copy Share Image
No more verbally incomprehensible no more devoid of the vision thing and no more the cautious pragmatist proudly displaying the virtues of… — Bob Dole Copy Share Image
Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn't start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes… — Amity Shlaes Copy Share Image
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical. — Adam Phillips Copy Share Image
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… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
