"From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paperwork with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will be all too late."

The opposite of pragmatism is not idealism. It’s wishful thinking.

Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable.

A posture of enthusiasm is not always the one best calculated to succeed.

We declare pragmatism to be bad, not indeed in its moral consequences (which, as a matter of fact, ought not to count in philosophy), but because it introduces into our fashion of thinking a degrading sophistry. Pragmatism, in its modern systematized form, would scarcely have been possible in earlier times. It has, however, become so since erudite scholars and original thinkers have deemed it fit to cater to a public incapable of taking a genuine interest in their researches and their speculations, a public which in the last resort wishes simply to amuse itself with these as it amuses itself with everything else, — the public of our modern democracies. We feel flattered by the plaudits of the crowd, and to procure these we are satisfied to get down to the level of those whom as thinkers we should disdain. Popular science, popular art, popular theology — only one thing was lacking — popular philosophy.

All too often, there is a lack of commitment to results and an over-infatuation with “process” or “hard work.

People are often being reactive instead of being proactive in reducing dangerous threats.

Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy.

He who considers too much will perform little.

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

Long-term success will never come if profit is the only aim.

The fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is in the particular situation. If the cost of failure is high, optimism is the wrong strategy.

It is unprofitable and unnecessary to bother oneself with trying to reshape another’s attitude.

Another is that pessimists often extrapolate present trends without accounting for how markets adapt.