Henry Adams Quotes

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

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.

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

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

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

I'm a pragmatist.

I'm just not a purist. You set goals and you have to work with everyone to figure out how to get what you can.

My only definition is that I am a pragmatist.

Theoretical principals must sometimes give way for the sake of practical advantages.

It is best to live however one can be.

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.

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.

I stick by my principles, and one of my principles is flexibility.

I'm really pragmatic. That's my reality.

I think I'm pragmatic.

People ask me if I'm liberal or conservative. I say neither - I'm pragmatic.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.

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.

If I believe in something, I will fight for it, with all I have. But I do not demand all or nothing. I would rather get something than nothing.

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

You must not try to be too pure, you must fly closer to the sea.

...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

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