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Pragmatism Quotes

“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.”

HumorTruthDeathEnergyExistenceSupportSacrificeAtheismMoralityArgumentLogicValueProofRidiculousDevotionWickedEnduranceMartyrSantaSanta ClausAssumptionsPragmatismFalseImbecilitySophistryTheologiansLogicians
Book:Minority Report
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“See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.”

PhilosophyTruthIdealismRationalismPragmatism
Book:Pragmatism and Other Writings
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“Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play. Then, exemplified by people such as Plato and Newton, it keeps modifying those games so that playing them is more interesting and profitable. Reason cannot get outside of the latest circle that imagination has drawn. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that imagination holds the primacy.”

ReasonPhilosophyImaginationRationalPragmatismLanguage Game
Author:Rorty Richard
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“Let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity" — objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": — in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our "idea" of that thing, our "objectivity." But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?”

PhilosophyObjectivityPragmatism
Book:On the Genealogy of Morals
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“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.”

LifePhilosophyReligionFaithBeliefAtheismCapitalismIslamMetaphysicsPostmodernismWestern WorldPragmatismWestern CultureIslamic TerrorismIslamismIslamic FundamentalismGrand NarrativesPhilosophical Scepticism
Book:The Meaning of Life
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“Blogging, writing conventional articles, and being science consultant and pocket protector ninja to various web portals and TV programs, quite often trying to promote the penicillin of hard data to people who had no interest in being cured of their ignorance.”

FactsIgnoranceDataIdealismPragmatismData AnalysisData Analytics
Book:Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Volume 132, Issue 12, December 2012
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“Der Pragmatismus ersetzt uns alles, was früher die großen Ideen, die Ideologien und Religionen, der Glaube an Friede, Menschenrechte und Demokratie zu bieten hatten. Der Pragmatismus hält uns davon ab, zu Verbrechern zu werden, oder er macht uns zu solchen, wenn es nötig ist. Er legitimiert das Bestehen von Rechtssystem, Familie und Arbeit, er lässt uns nett sein und empfiehlt, sich ein angenehmes Äußeres zu erwerben. Nachdem wir uns aller Zwänge nach und nach erledigt haben, sorgt ein einziger Betreuer für uns: Pragmatismus.”

PhilosophyReligionIdeologyPragmatism
Book:Spieltrieb
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“KODO SAWAKI ~ To practice the buddha way is not to let our minds wander but to become one with what we’re doing. This is called zanmai (or samadhi) and shikan (or “just doing”). Eating rice isn’t preparation for shitting; shitting isn’t preparation for making manure. And yet these days people think that high school is preparation for college and college is preparation for a good job.”

SchoolEducationMindfulnessMaterialismZen BuddhismPragmatism
Book:Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo
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“What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.”

DespairPragmatism
Book:The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
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“Our assumptions and presuppositions filter our perceptions of reality without any conscious effort. Even when we’re trying to be objective, we can’t get outside of ourselves to be unbiased. In addition, we have outside influences that also distort our perceptions of reality.”

TruthLimitsLiesDeceptionBiasWorldviewParadigmPragmatismPreconception
Book:Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate: The Absolute Proof of the Biblical Account
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“We should also note that a great deal of what is in a worldview isn’t even direct experience. We watch talking heads and videos that shape our worldviews. We read books and watch movies that shape our worldviews. Many other influences work on us, and most of these have been designed to shape our worldviews without our awareness. Our friends also influence us for good or evil. We daydream and rationalize and shape our worldviews that way. Worldviews are fake realities that seem deceptively real. Most of the time, we never question our worldviews but blindly trust them to run our lives. That’s the definition of living a lie.”

TruthLimitsLiesDeceptionBiasWorldviewParadigmPragmatismPreconception
Book:Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate
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“Worldviews are fake realities made up of past interpretations. Interpretations aren’t the same as observations, and they aren’t the same as experiences. Interpretations add to the experiences of the past, and what they add is unreliable. What they add ultimately consists of made-up stuff mixed with flawed memories of some things that may or may not have worked in the past.”

TruthLimitsLiesDeceptionBiasWorldviewParadigmAssumptionsPragmatismPreconception
Book:Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate: The Absolute Proof of the Biblical Account
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“Worldviews aren’t even directly pragmatic. Many parts of our worldviews don’t even work. They limit us. They interfere with us. They hold us down. Some parts of our worldviews may be accurate while other parts of our worldviews are wildly inaccurate. And yet, every part of every person’s worldview seems accurate to the person who owns the worldview.”

TruthLimitsLiesDeceptionBiasWorldviewParadigmPragmatismPreconception
Book:Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate: The Absolute Proof of the Biblical Account
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“Pessimism doesn’t change the reality; it prolongs the status quo. And it brings everyone down. It’s only ever lose-lose. Optimism and faith coupled with pragmatism change the reality. Self-belief and self-reliance change the reality. Boldness to explore new ideas changes the reality. A vision powered by effort and energy changes the reality.”

RealityFaithChangeEffortOptimismPessimismSelf RelianceChange The WorldSelf BeliefPragmatism
Author:Rania Al Abdullah
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“Most of my time is spent in doing as well as I can the work immediatekt at hand. One hopes that by doing quietly and with parade as solid work as one can when one is occupied, on makes the best contribution possible to one's state.”

StrongWorkPatienceManagementStrategyProductivityPragmatism
Book:The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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“Pragmatism, by its very name, poses above all as a 'pholosophy of action'; its more or less avowed assumption is that man only has needs of a practical order, material ones and, together with these, sentimental ones. It means, then, the doing away with intellectuality; but, if this is so, why go on wanting to evolve theories? That is rather hard to understand; and if pragmatism, like skepticism, which it only differs from with regard to action, wished to conform to its own standards, it would have to limit itself to a mere mental attitude, which it cannot even seek to justify logically without giving itself the lie; but there is no doubt that it is very difficult to keep strictly within such bounds.”

PhilosophyLogicPragmatismLogical ThinkingPractical PhilosophyContinental Philosophy
Book:EAST AND WEST
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“The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia headed for even greater disaster. 'Charge the cockpit or you die!' cried the pro-Trump intellectual right. 'I'd rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,' said the pro-Trump left. When people believe that the world is heading off a cliff, they are receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: 'What do you have to lose?' But if the media and intellectuals put events into statistical and historical context, rather than constantly crying 'crisis,' they would make it clearer what the answer to that question is. Revolutionary regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when a charismatic leader forces a radical personal vision on a society. A modern liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it's better to solve problems than to start a conflagration and hope for the best.”

ReasonScienceLogicIntelligenceStupidityReasoningPragmatismLogical Thinking
Author:Steven Pinker
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“Academics place much more importance on rigorous logic. There is also admiration in the profession for subtle reasoning. And mastery of the craft shows itself in the elegance of the intellectual super-structure…. The practitioner, on the other hand, uses economic theory only to the extent that he finds it useful in comprehending the problem at hand, so that practical courses of action will emerge which can be evaluated not merely in narrow economic cost-benefit terms, but by taking into account a wider range of considerations…. A practitioner is not judged by the rigour of his logic or by the elegance of his presentation. He is judged by results.”

ResultsLogicPragmatismLogical ThinkingAcademicsTheory And PracticeResult OrientedPractitioners
Author:Goh Keng Swee
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“Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us.”

MeditationSolitudeGreedInner PeaceLustHeartacheNarcissismAvariceHeadacheRestlessnessPragmatismHedonism
Book:The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
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“Neither nature nor history can tell us what we ought to do. Facts, whether those of nature or those of history, cannot make the decision for us, they cannot determine the ends we are going to choose. It is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history. Men are not equal; but we can decide to fight for equality. Human institutions such as the state are not rational, but we can decide to fight to make them more rational. We ourselves and our ordinary language are, on the whole, emotional rather than rational; but we can try to become a little more rational, and we can train ourselves to use our language as an instrument not of self-expression (as our romantic educationists would say) but of rational communication. History itself I mean the history of power politics, of course, not the non-existent story of the development of mankind has no end nor meaning, but we can decide to give it both. We can make it our fight for the open society and against its antagonists (who, when in a corner, always protest their humanitarian sentiments, in accordance with Pareto's advice) and we can interpret it accordingly. Ultimately, we may say the same about the 'meaning of life'. It is up to us to decide what shall be our purpose in life, to determine our ends. This dualism of facts and decisions is, I believe, fundamental. Facts as such have no meaning; they can gain it only through our decisions. Historicism is only one of many attempts to get over this dualism; it is born of fear, for it shrinks from realizing that we bear the ultimate responsibility even for the standards we choose. But such an attempt seems to me to represent precisely what is usually described as superstition. For it assumes that we can reap where we have not sown; it tries to persuade us that if we merely fall into step with history everything will and must go right, and that no fundamental decision on our part is required; it tries to shift our responsibility on to history, and thereby on to the play of demoniac powers beyond ourselves; it tries to base our actions upon the hidden intentions of these powers, which can be revealed to us only in mystical inspirations and intuitions; and it thus puts these actions and decisions on the moral level of one who, inspired by horoscopes and dreams, chooses his lucky number in a lottery.”

PhilosophyHuman NatureAspirationPragmatismMoral Obligation
Book:The Open society & its enemies: Vol 2 Hegel & Marx
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“A culture can be thought of as ever-evolving software that sits on top of—and synergistically interacts with—both biological hardware and firmware, addressing flaws our biology hasn’t had sufficient evolutionary time to address. To go further with this analogy: Biological evolution provides some basic coding, much like a low-level programming language might for a given hardware, whereas cultural evolution manipulates the high-level, object-oriented code that lets us program highly nuanced behaviors.”

HumanityMankindHuman NatureEntertainingProvocativeBetter FuturePragmatismCulturesPreserveWide Ranging
Book:The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
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“When a person gets severe radiation poisoning, some time passes before they feel the adverse effects. Their DNA has functionally been scrambled; their cells can’t divide; the person is dead—they just don’t know it yet. Many wildly popular cultural movements are currently in this state. It may be easier to coax a caged panda to reproduce than it would be to convince a cosmopolitan progressive to raise their own kid.”

ReligionHumanityMankindHuman NatureEntertainingProvocativeBetter FuturePragmatismCulturesWide Ranging
Book:The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
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“Almost all hard cultures have some ritual focused on voluntary self-denial, such as Ramadan, Lent, or the Fast of the Firstborn. The question is, why? Why do cultures that practice something that makes membership less pleasant historically outcompete cultures that encourage people to indulge in whatever they want? This question becomes more pointed when we look at how common it is for pop cultures to emotionally reward people for succumbing to their base desires, as is seen in pop culture outputs like the Intuitive Eating Movement, which entails telling people they are being healthy by eating whatever they want whenever they want in an age in which we’re surrounded with an abundance of foods that are designed to be highly addictive. Movements telling people to indulge in their immediate desires have been around since the ancient Greeks. These movements resurface during every civilization’s brief golden age and only seem to be successful in the short run. While the pop cultures that produce them consistently die, stodgy hard cultures persist. Why?”

ReligionHumanityMankindEntertainingProvocativeBetter FutureGuidePragmatismCulturesWide Ranging
Book:The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
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“Society can be thought of as a collection of overlapping nodal networks (things like companies and cultivars), with each node representing a person and their connections to other people. Historically, pop cultures, simple memetic viruses, evolved to target single nodes. These cultures would flip target nodes (convert them) by offering individuals an easy life and positive emotional subsets. While these viruses lowered the birth rates among the individual nodes they flipped and could sometimes lead to wild outbreaks, those outbreaks were always contained within single or closely-related nodal networks, meaning they were never really an existential threat to our species. . . .The supervirus evolved a new strategy. Instead of flipping individual nodes, it works to flip entire nodal networks. Instead of selling the promise of minimizing emotional suffering within a single node, it entices nodal systems with the prospect of minimizing negative emotion across the entire network.”

ReligionHumanityMankindEntertainingProvocativeBetter FutureGuidePragmatismCulturesWide Ranging
Book:The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
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“Upon hearing about an Indian caste system comprised of five main castes, each of which is divided into about 3,000 sub-castes based on occupation, most foreigners contextualize the concept as being quite alien. People of Anglo-Saxon descent may come to this conclusion forgetting that many of their brethren still walk around with names like Smith and Tailor attached to them—names that hail from a similar caste system. That’s right: In the medieval period, families often maintained specialist trades passed down from one generation to the next. While the Anglo-Saxon caste system was never as strict as that which ultimately developed in India, it wasn’t profoundly less strict than its pre-British Indian counterpart. . . .  What is fascinating about caste systems, and likely a core reason they evolved in so many cultures, is that they allow for the genetic concentration of skills within certain specialties. As offensive as this concept is, the genetic vortices created by castes are so strong that their effects can be seen centuries after they dissolved. A study  conducted in the U.K. in 2015 found that people with the surname Smith (descended from the smith caste) had higher physical capabilities and an above-average aptitude for strength-related activities, while those with the surname Tailor (descended from the tailor caste) had a higher-than-average aptitude for dexterity-related tasks.”

ReligionHumanityMankindEntertainingProvocativeRebuildingGuidePragmatismCulturesWide Ranging
Book:The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
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“On Wednesday night, November 13, (1861), Lincoln went with Seward and Hay to McClellan's house. Told that the general was at a wedding, the three waited in the parlor for an hour. When McClellan arrived home, the porter told him the president was waiting, but McClellan passed by the parlor room and climbed the stairs to his private quarters. After another half hour, Lincoln again sent word that he was waiting, only to be informed that the general had gone to sleep. Young John Hay was enraged, " I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come," he wrote in his diary, recounting what he considered an inexcusable "insolence of epaulettes," the first indicator "of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities." To Hay's surprise, Lincoln "seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity." He would hold McClellan's horse, he once said, if a victory could be achieved. Though Lincoln, the consummate pragmatist, did not express anger at McClellan's rebuff, his aides fumed at every instance of such arrogance. Lincoln's secretary, William Stoddard, described the infuriating delay when he accompanied Lincoln to McClellan's anteroom. "A minute passes, then another, and then another, and with every tick of the clock upon the mantel your blood warms nearer and nearer its boiling-point. Your face feels hot and your fingers tingle, as you look at the man, sitting so patiently over there...and you try to master your rebellious consciousness." As time went by, Lincoln visited the haughty general less frequently. If he wanted to talk with McClellan, he sent a summons for him to appear at the White House.”

KindnessHumilityPatiencePragmatismSelf RestraintForbearanceAbraham Lincoln
Book:Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
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“While general memetic sets replicate primarily by using a host to infect other hosts with said meme, cultural and religious memetic sets primarily spread by influencing the fitness of any given host . . . Because culture can affect a person’s number of surviving offspring, traditional evolution (not just memetic evolution) shapes culture. This interplay allows complex behavior patterns to emerge among groups of people well before those behavioral instincts might otherwise biologically evolve.”

CultureAtheismDiversityUniqueAgnosticismPragmatismEnvironmentalistsFertility DeclinePopulation DeclineEnviromental Sustainability
Book:The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models
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