Vitruvius Quotes

An ideologue believes that what is right will work. A pragmatist believes that what works is right.

Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose.

But principles defended at the expense of pragmatic application is the business of priests.

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

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

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.

I don't care what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do.

We have to learn how to work within the limits that are possible, not what is desirable.

An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.

It's all very well to have principles, but when it comes to money you have to be flexible.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

To understand the theory which underlies all things is not sufficient. Theory is but the preparation for practice.

Principles ... become modified in practice, by facts.

That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the absolute, to find out what is within our powers.

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

I learned over time that you do not go for the perfect solution….You do what is doable and then you want to try and do a little bit more.

On Pragmatism: It's all very well in theory but it doesn't work in practice

Having principles is important, but you don’t want to walk off a cliff with your principles.

A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

We want to be as routine-oriented as we can, but it's just not always feasible.

You can do anything you want, as long as it works.

Leaders honor their core values, but they are flexible in how they execute them.

It's better to be burnished with use than rusty with principle.

Ideals are great in theory ... but they don't work too well in real life.

The strongest streak in the American character is a fierce pragmatism that mistrust blind ideology of every stripe and insists on finding what really works.