Quotes about Pragmatism

Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hope that the cow will back up to them.

Pragmatism and subjectivism obscure the reality of the truth. They engage the mind, but they make it the servant of our desires and our work. But they can't answer which desires I should pursue and which work is worthwhile.

Relativism, as we saw in the previous chapter, undermines that effort. It kidnaps the happy handmaiden of truth and makes her serve the pride and pleasure of pragmatists. Relativists don't pursue truth. They make the denial of truth serve them.

Art isn't meaningless. - It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. - In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grandstand peopled with ghosts. - Give a good show anyhow. - On the contrary, I'd feel, it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless. Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that sophistic rot?

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.

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

I agree with you, that in Politicks the Middle Way is none at all.

Mix idealism with realism and add hard work. This will often bring much more than you could ever hope for.

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either.

The true Christian must be both an idealist and a realist. We must have dreams and visions for better things in the future because that is what faith demands. However at the same time, we cannot ignore the reality of what is taking place right now. The key is not to let what you see now steal what you believe for the future.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.