Practical Consequences Quotes

Foreign policy should not be justified through making oneself feel good, but through results that have tangible consequences.

Basic research, performed for curiosity today, will drive the innovations years from now. When qunatum mecahnics was curioisty-driven basic research 80 years ago, no none had any inkling that there would be prectical cosequences of it. However today much more than half of entire gross nationa product was and is dependent on quantum mechanics. Cell phones, computers, and all the things we enjory were innovations that could not have taken place without an understanding of quantum mechanics.

Insofar as we may at all claim that slavery has been abolished today, we owe its abolition to the practical consequences of science

Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues.

Grub first, then ethics.

Now that we've made that decision, everyone is thinking about the practical consequences and I think Theresa May could be the most challenging prime ministership since the Suez Crisis, possibly since the Second World War.

A think may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent.

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?

I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, "virtue effects" in economics- for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodomand Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on.

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference could be traced, then … all dispute is idle.

Don't bother to examine a folly-ask yourself only what it accomplishes.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

The "seriousness" of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.