Top 100 Pragmatic Quotes
#1. But principles defended at the expense of pragmatic application is the business of priests.
Kathleen Parker
#2. As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.
Harold Bloom
#3. The Constitution separated the ideologies and values of the Church from the State, and leaders of the State were thus educated in matters pertaining to the State. These leaders proved themselves time after time with their pragmatic intellectual capacities.
Mike Medavoy
#4. Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#5. Contrary to what most people believe, trust is not some soft, illusive quality that you either have or you don't; rather, trust is a pragmatic, tangible, actionable asset that you can create.
Stephen Covey
#6. My father has a pragmatic mind. He marched with Dr. King in the '60s, and he's very much for women's rights.
Tori Amos
#7. I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date.
Anne Hathaway
#8. All my life I have prayed to God that I should remain religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal and economically pragmatic.
Richard John Neuhaus
#9. That renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?
Jennifer Haigh
#10. Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it ... Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.
James Lovelock
#11. Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#12. These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
Alain De Botton
#13. I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well.
Linus Torvalds
#14. As I grew older and more mature, I've been able to move beyond the immediate response of violence to a projection of the pragmatic, political consequences of that violence. So it's an effort to attain equilibrium.
Wole Soyinka
#15. In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.
Edmund White
#16. However pragmatic you are, it is very demanding being a new parent.
Robert Winston
#17. I tend to be really pragmatic, but ultimately tend to be attracted to people who pull me into more spontaneity. I've really learned that, through surrender, the best experiences of my life have happened.
Amy Adams
#18. Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#19. I have a very pragmatic approach to diets. Ones you can't stick to don't do you any good. Some people say, 'Just eat half of what's on your plate,' but I can't do that!
Nathan Myhrvold
#20. So as a founder, you have an authenticity and a human factor that is really special and that gives an enormous amount of energy and fuel. But as a founder, you're also not as cold, maybe, or as pragmatic.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#21. I don't have this fantasy about marriage anymore. Everyone says it takes hard work. Well, it kind of does - and I'm much more pragmatic about romance than I used to be.
Jennifer Garner
#22. Knowing yourself, knowing where you want to get, combining those things gives you the pragmatic steps.
John Amaechi
#23. For pragmatic reasons, I love the routine. I love the structure of it. I love knowing that my days are free. I know where I'm going at night. I know my life is kind of orderly. I just like that better.
Andrea Martin
#24. Progress must not become progressivism, where success is measured only by achieving pragmatic results.
Mal Fletcher
#25. We're always flexible and pragmatic ... It's always important to watch the unemployment rate and to make sure that we can keep most Canadians working. We were successful in that back in 2008-09.
Jim Flaherty
#26. Keeping small nations enslaved because of the deals between the great nations or because of any pragmatic considerations that might have been there are totally unacceptable.
Mikheil Saakashvili
#27. Stronach's fragile beauty belies an emotional strength, pragmatic resiliency, and intellectual courage. Her ideas and choreography are both enigmatic and playful.
Tami Stronach
#28. Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#29. My grandfather and dad worked at General American Transportation Corp. in Chicago, a company that made tank cars and freight cars. We had a pragmatic, Republican, manufacturing, Illinois consciousness as far as employment went.
Bill Moseley
#30. Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.
Al-Waleed Bin Talal
#31. Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#32. War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.
Jacque Fresco
#33. Many in Taiwan believe that Hu Jintao is much more sophisticated than his predecessors in understanding Taiwan. He represents a different generation of leaders, more pragmatic, less ideological.
Ma Ying-jeou
#34. Before having children, I think I probably approached work very differently, and you become much more economical and pragmatic about your relationship to it.
Cate Blanchett
#36. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.
Muriel Barbery
#37. I sometimes call my new system 'Italian pagan Catholicism,' but it could more accurately be called 'pragmatic liberalism,' with roots in Enlightenment political philosophy. It is a synthesis of the enduring dual elements in our culture, pagan and Judeo-Christian, Romantic and Classic.
Camille Paglia
#38. Indeed, it may be suggested that 'traditions' and pragmatic conventions or routines are inversely related.
Eric Hobsbawm
#39. American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.
Henry A. Kissinger
#40. We need a government that is what we are at our best. Smart, efficient, pragmatic and compassionate.
Deval Patrick
#41. Change is always a question; they that find good and pragmatic answers to it cause true change that make real impact
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#42. [Michael Bitbol] asked us to ponder whether the purpose of science is to provide answers about what things are in themselves, or if science is only our most advanced way of developing a pragmatic, conventional knowledge of phenomena sufficient to guide us in our actions.
Pier Luigi Luisi
#43. I try to be realistic and pragmatic. I have a lot of hope for humanity as a species, but obviously as individuals we can be extremely flawed. We may have to go through some very terrible times in the near future, even if we ultimately survive as Homo sapiens.
Annalee Newitz
#44. What I would like to vote for is a candidate that is socially liberal, a fiscal conservative, broadly libertarian with a small 'l' but sensible and pragmatic and with a chance of winning. That's more or less the empty set.
Tyler Cowen
#45. The Empire was not known for its roomy architecture. It was fond of austere pragmatism (that term, austere pragmatism, or sometimes pragmatic austerity, found its way atop many Imperial brochures and propaganda tracts), and so kept its hallways low and narrow.
Chuck Wendig
#46. Your thoughts create reality. The most pragmatic way to create world peace is to use your power of visualization. Think Peace, Act Peace, Spread Peace, Imagine Peace. Your thoughts will soon cover the planet. The most important thing is to believe in your power. It works.
Yoko Ono
#47. For me, couture is the kingdom of imagination, creativity and experimentation, and this is how I approach it. I do, however, remain pragmatic and realistic.
Giorgio Armani
#48. We have put the Cold War behind us. We no longer count our divisions and our warheads. And I am Russia's first civilian defense minister in many centuries. We have become more pragmatic.
Sergei Ivanov
#49. My mum is a bit unconventional; she's outdoorsy and has more of an emotional intelligence, whereas my dad is pragmatic; he's a businessman.
Tamsin Egerton
#50. Between the creative, open and spontaneous approach to life, and the highly disciplined, pragmatic approach, there's a doorway, if you can find it - and it leads to immortality.
Frederick Lenz
#51. President Nixon was a pragmatic strategist. He would engage, not contain, China, but he would also quietly set pieces into place for a fallback position should China not play according to the rules as a good global citizen.
Lee Kuan Yew
#52. I started, you know, to work as a diplomat during the Soviet days, and in spite of ideology being very high on the Communist Party agenda, I can assure you that in practical terms, we have always been trying to be pragmatic.
Sergei Lavrov
#53. Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.
Warren G. Bennis
#54. Instead of looking at leadership as decision making - as a rational process of sifting through data, analyzing trends, and making decisions based on predicting futures - a design framework emphasizes pragmatic experimentation.
Frank J. Barrett
#55. What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#56. I work on fittings, mostly. You know, I sketch less and less in my work. I sketch for the show sometimes, but then it becomes more conceptual. But when I don't sketch, it becomes more pragmatic.
Alber Elbaz
#57. I'm pragmatic. I like efficiency. I want to read what's in front of me and not have my hands tied.
Susan Brooks
#59. Despite the mythic heights to which he was raised, Azikiwe was nothing if not pragmatic, a realist always conscious of his limits and ever eager to extract all that was possible from that limited horizon.
Nnamdi Azikiwe
#60. In the India I was growing up in, history wasn't really a wise career option. People would joke and say, 'History's okay, but what's your actual job?' I didn't come from a privileged background and couldn't afford to be irresponsible, so I did the pragmatic thing and did a MBA.
Amish Tripathi
#61. Somewhere between the intellectual idea of why we're attracted to certain things and the pragmatic reality is some form of ever-evolving truth.
Billy Corgan
#62. Nanny Ogg had a pragmatic attitude to the truth; she told it if it was convenient and she couldn't be bothered to make up something more interesting.
Terry Pratchett
#63. The reason why we're strippers, is invariably more boring, more grounded in nonexistential needs like money - and pragmatic concerns, like money.
Ruth Fowler
#64. I'm afraid I don't have a very pragmatic or unromantic view of props. I don't imbue them with any great sense of mystery or anything.
Martin Freeman
#65. In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
Michael Graves
#66. The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.
Richard M. Weaver
#67. I think in Singapore, we stand a chance of making the one-man-one-vote system work. With amendments as we have done, you know, like GRCs.. We need to make it work. And I believe with pragmatic adjustments, given these favourable conditions, we can have more open debate.
Lee Kuan Yew
#68. I have a sort of long-term plan to direct. I'm pragmatic about it. I realize I don't need to rush it or force it.
David Wenham
#69. Pragmatic conservatism is less idealistic than central conservatism. The goal is to get ahead, to serve your self-interest. The idealistic parts of conservatism are seen as effective means to achieve that goal.
George Lakoff
#70. I shook myself, trying to figure out what I should do and who I should be. Defaulting to pragmatic me was easiest because it was where I lived most of the time. I was good at bottling my frustrations and disappointments, especially when they didn't really matter.
- brought tears to my eyes btw -
Penny Reid
#71. Its own position veers towards the pragmatic evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited.
Gurcharan Das
#72. If you give up on your principles I don't think that's being pragmatic ... Doing the wrong thing, even partially, isn't being practical ... if you have the right ideas and are forceful enough ... I think you can get the support you need.
Ron Paul
#73. The difficulty with pragmatic arguments for a religion is that truths do not always "work", and beliefs that "work" are by no means always true.
John Warwick Montgomery
#74. When I first was exposed to Buddhism in the mid-1960s, I said it was so practical and utterly pragmatic. That's what attracted me to Buddhism.
Joan Halifax
#75. It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#76. He was a realist with too much fervor and not enough reverie. He always remained pragmatic in a place that had too much use for superstition. That's enough to ruin any man.
Tom Piccirilli
#77. If at the beginning and end of our lives we depend upon the kindness of others, why in the middle of our lives should we not act kindly toward them? It is the pragmatic choice.
Dalai Lama XIV
#78. One of the strengths of Labor Zionism had always been its strong pragmatic outlook, its philosophy that a new reality can be built only by careful planning and then constructing things brick by brick, acre after acre. It
Thomas L. Friedman
#79. Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits.
Neal Stephenson
#80. The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue.
William James
#81. God's downward descent to us in grace reversed by our upward ascent in pragmatic enthusiasm, we are increasingly becoming a sheep without a Shepherd - and all in the name of mission. Instead of churching the unchurched, we are well on our way to even unchurching the churched.
Michael S. Horton
#82. I have no Napoleonic dream. I'm just hard-working and pragmatic.
Roman Abramovich
#83. We live in more pragmatic times than when we originally recorded those songs. But many of the dreamers of the '60s have been elected to governmental office or taken on a leadership role in their communities. They are now in the position to make a difference.
Paul Stookey
#84. The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic ... Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.
John Dewey
#85. In such a therapeutic, pragmatic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps society as ours, the message of God having to do all the work in saving us comes as an offensive shot at our egos.
Michael Horton
#86. The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille Paglia
#87. I'm pragmatic. If I were cruel, I'd give him an eulogy instead of a conversation.
Leigh Bardugo
#88. I'm pragmatic. If this is going to make sense, get me a job, and in the end let me put my kids through school. I'll play killers. But my kids always ask me, 'Do you die in this one, too, Daddy?'
Colm Feore
#89. I grew up with Scientology - my parents at one point were clerical. It's a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief system. Yeah, it's had media exposure because certain luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who are not celebrities. It's not a threat or some cult.
Giovanni Ribisi
#90. How could a man become a god?" Nell asked. "By living in an extremely pragmatic society," said Constable Moore after some thought
Neal Stephenson
#91. I'm a very pragmatic soul. I'm part of the business and I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to being an over-believer in spiritual or in paranormal matters.
Jane Anderson
#92. I'm a pragmatic man. I'll veer on the dangerous side, because I love dangerous subjects, but I won't shoot a show in the foot.
Harold Prince
#93. The heart knows no logic beyond need and desire; the head has no senses except the common and the pragmatic. Neither, frankly, is particularly useful in love, anyway.
J. Nozipo Maraire
#94. As Pragmatic Programmers, our base material isn't wood or iron, it's knowledge. We gather requirements as knowledge, and then express that knowledge in our designs, implementations, tests, and documents.
Andrew Hunt
#95. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age.
Haruki Murakami
#96. An ethical action, like an unethical action, is usually analyzed by politicians purely in pragmatic terms.
Adam Michnik
#97. do you tell if someone is immortal?" she whispered. "You kill them, and see if they get up again," he answered, always pragmatic.
A.W. Exley
#98. I'm not asking any of you to make drastic changes to every single one of your recipes or to totally change the way you do business. But what I am asking is that you consider reformulating your menu in pragmatic and incremental ways to create healthier versions of the foods that we all love.
Michelle Obama
#99. Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.
Kate Morton
#100. Directing is a more pragmatic experience, where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don't have to make when you're writing.
Charlie Kaufman
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