Madeleine Albright Quotes

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’m very outcomes-oriented—what’s the best way to get there? Sometimes it’s being diplomatic and sometimes it’s being harsh…. So you just have to calibrate and figure out what is the end state you’re trying to get to…. It depends on what you are trying to achieve.

I think President Obama is a committed, practicing nonideologue. He's consumed by neither tactics nor ideology. He is more concerned about outcomes than he is about process and categorizations.

I'm a pragmatist.

When you're failing, there's a very powerful incentive to put ideology aside and just do what seems to work.

Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly.

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

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

People can be sensitive, so if I need to, I'll suck it up and be more flowery. I'll do what it takes to get the outcome I want. As I like to say, sometimes you have to crouch to conquer.

I understand now the different games and the different approaches that you need to take at different times, with different styles of play.

Indeed, in foreign policymaking, inconsistency is often a virtue. I speak not of principles but of policy.

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

Be firm on principle but flexible on method.

I believe in anything that works.

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.

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

We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.

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

Firmness in support of fundamentals, with flexibility in tactics and methods, is the key to any hope of progress in negotiation.

I don't really care about being right, I just care about success.

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.

Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

I've always believed in quickness over strength and size.

Be flexible, but stick to your principles.