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3ab18b2
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The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.
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responsibility
proactive
true-religion
atheism
pragmatism
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Robert Green Ingersoll |
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92b444e
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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?
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pragmatism
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Graham Greene |
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afd8bc2
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They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.
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idealism
politics
ideals
pragmatism
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G. K. Chesterton |
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4bf1df0
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"Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending together to the stars. Then he shook his head, and the spell broke. He opened his eyes, grinning ruefully. As if he knew his thoughts had infected mine. As if he knew his power. "Better get on with it," he said. "Make do with what there is."
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reality
parallel-universe
pragmatism
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Salman Rushdie |
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d8d9778
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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.
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pragmatism
values
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Charles Dickens |
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d78c921
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As usual, the note occupied less than a page and included neither salutation nor closing, Uncle Hal's opinion being that since the letter had a direction upon it, the intended recipient was obvious, the seal indicated plainly who had written it, and he did not waste his time in writing to fools.
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pragmatism
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Diana Gabaldon |
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c6581f2
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To be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's pragmatic world, with everyone out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to being a fool, wasn't it?
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pragmatism
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Shūsaku Endō |
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d508a59
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Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams.
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dreams
pragmatism
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Azar Nafisi |
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29db738
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In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big - ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
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faith
religion
life
philosophy
grand-narratives
islamic-fundamentalism
philosophical-scepticism
western-world
western-culture
metaphysics
islamic-terrorism
belief
capitalism
islam
islamism
pragmatism
postmodernism
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Terry Eagleton |
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860d9d8
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"Do you know what I think?" Marcone said. "You think we should shoot Nicodemus in the back at the first opportunity and let Michael dismember him." "Yes." I drew my gun. "Okay."
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humor
pragmatism
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Jim Butcher |
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37ae7f2
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Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be de- struction.
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perfection
politics
pragmatism
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ee3885a
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Witta feared nothing - except to be poor.
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money
wealth
pragmatism
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Rudyard Kipling |
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b1f62dc
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"On Wednesday night, November 13, (1861), Lincoln went with Seward and Hay to McClellan's house. Told that the general was at a wedding, the three waited in the parlor for an hour. When McClellan arrived home, the porter told him the president was waiting, but McClellan passed by the parlor room and climbed the stairs to his private quarters. After another half hour, Lincoln again sent word that he was waiting, only to be informed that the general had gone to sleep. Young John Hay was enraged, " I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come," he wrote in his diary, recounting what he considered an inexcusable "insolence of epaulettes," the first indicator "of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities." To Hay's surprise, Lincoln "seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity." He would hold McClellan's horse, he once said, if a victory could be achieved. Though Lincoln, the consummate pragmatist, did not express anger at McClellan's rebuff, his aides fumed at every instance of such arrogance. Lincoln's secretary, William Stoddard, described the infuriating delay when he accompanied Lincoln to McClellan's anteroom. "A minute passes, then another, and then another, and with every tick of the clock upon the mantel your blood warms nearer and nearer its boiling-point. Your face feels hot and your fingers tingle, as you look at the man, sitting so patiently over there...and you try to master your rebellious consciousness." As time went by, Lincoln visited the haughty general less frequently. If he wanted to talk with McClellan, he sent a summons for him to appear at the White House."
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kindness
forbearance
self-restraint
humility
pragmatism
patience
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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a020623
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Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.
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one-at-a-time
think-global-act-local
revolution
pragmatism
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3bbef2a
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"The ways of the heart are complex." He looked out at the ocean again. "The waves churn and break upon the rocks, Talon. So do human feelings. Passion can be a man's undoing. With passion must come wisdom; otherwise, your enemies have a weapon to use against you." --
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wisdom
passionate-love
pragmatism
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Raymond E. Feist |
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38af6e7
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When a kingdom rests on it, I always expect difficulty. Then, if there is none, no blame. But if there is, one is prepared.
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optimism
pessimism
planning
pragmatism
strategy
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Geraldine Brooks |
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e32ded7
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Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.
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leadership
manipulation
pragmatism
persuasion
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Geraldine Brooks |