Pragmatist's Quotes

#1. It's a pragmatist's business, comedy. Start off with good intentions and references to the Pompidou Centre and you end up with boiled sweets and a pantomime cow.

Mel Smith

#2. 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. He's actually a pragmatist.

Will Self

#3. It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic.

Debasish Mridha

#4. Despite appearances I'm not a cynic. I'm a sarcastic pragmatist.

Stephen B5 Jones

#5. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.

G.K. Chesterton

#6. I'm not a Pollyanna; I'm a pragmatist.

Laura Lang

#7. I'm a kindhearted but highly competitive pragmatist. When I seek to win something, I always make certain it's never at the expense of anything more serious than the inadequate efforts of others.

Jonathan Kieran

#8. President Obama is perhaps the most ideologically-motivated president in American history. But according to the ultimate authority, Barack Obama, he's a mere pragmatist.

Ben Shapiro

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

Philip Kitcher

#10. If moral values amount to nothing but subjective phenomena of the human mind without independent meaning and existence - a position held by a variety of naturalist, positivist, and pragmatist philosophers - one never can be found lacking in light of an objective standard of moral values.

Reinhard Hutter

#11. Only a coward captures men the way you did."
"A coward? Or a pragmatist?

Sarah J. Maas

#12. Pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm.

Jane Fonda

#13. I have great respect for Sandra Day O'Connor. She has broken so many barriers for women in the law, and was a master negotiator and pragmatist in her days on the Supreme Court.

Kyrsten Sinema

#14. Generally speaking, followers will not commit themselves for very long to a leader who is not also a pragmatist. As most of us have discovered, dreams are only powerful when we believe they can come true. Pipe dreams belong in the realm of fantasy; leaders' dreams belong in the realm of possibility.

Marlene Caroselli

#15. To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, What would the world be like if it were true? The operationist asks, What would we have to do to come to believe it? For the pragmatist the question is, What would we do if did believe it?

Abraham Kaplan

#16. I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism.

Vernon A. Walters

#17. I'm not sure if President Obama is an ideologue or a pragmatist. I am hoping and praying he's a pragmatist.

Rudy Giuliani

#18. I use that as my responsibility on the show, to be the pragmatist.

Fisher Stevens

#19. As a rationalist, pragmatist, and a scientist I rarely involve myself in the cosmological arguments of the creation of the universe.

Debasish Mridha

#20. 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 bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.

Alan Watts

#21. The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic.

Stephen King

#22. David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic.

Geraldine Brooks

#23. My only definition is that I am a pragmatist.

Enrique Pena Nieto

#24. Eventually a guy behind the hog farmer broke ranks, and stepped forward. A pragmatist, clearly. He walked to the car and lifted the hatchback and put the bags inside, one by one, first Keever's, then Chang's.

Lee Child

#25. No more verbally incomprehensible no more devoid of the vision thing and no more the cautious pragmatist proudly displaying the virtues of tradition and the advantages of biological seniority.

Bob Dole

#26. I'm a pragmatist.

Richard Sherman

#27. As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.

Stacy Schiff

#28. A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

#29. I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but I always take realities of today, lessons from the distant and recent past into consideration.

Vladimir Putin

#30. The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#31. The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.

William James

#32. Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.

Eugene Jarecki

#33. Tell me about Gang Starr,' said Nishant, in an effort to start a conversation I'd be interested in.
'One MC, one DJ ... '
'Classic combo,' Anand affirmed.
'No hype man?'
'No.'
'What do we need Anand for?' Nishant shrugged, ever the pragmatist, never the catcher of feelings.

Nikesh Shukla

#34. I don't take myself that seriously. I'm a pragmatist.

Guy Kawasaki