146 Quotes About Pragmatism

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

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.

Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

We make versions, and true versions make worlds.

If a man burns to learn and sets himself to comparing his ideas with experimental results in order that he may correct those ideas, every scientific man will recognize him as a brother, no matter how small his knowledge may be.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

Are you choosing your life from the past, the expectation of the future, or from this very moment?

To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.