Pragmatic Idealism
Pragmatic Idealism offers humble suggestions for getting our shit together, inspired by “Apophthegms & Interludes” in Friedrich Nietszche’s Beyond Good and Evil
(Creative Commons licensing: CC BY-NC-ND)
On Life and Living It
Never, ever side with ignorance.
Respect, not agreement, is the basis for human relationships.
Don’t mistake being loud for being right.
If you’re not going to do it right, get away from it.
Lots of people mistake control for leadership.
(Control means that we must follow someone. Leadership means that we want to.)
Branches always extend out
from a trunk, which is held in place
by the roots.
Decisions that are driven by what we don’t want are not likely to land us where we do want to be.
People who stand behind a bully might be doing it to avoid cowering in front of him.
Don’t hate anything. (Hating takes energy, and that energy can be better spent anywhere else.)
There is no such thing as “friendly fire.” Fire has no friends.
Don’t fry bacon without a shirt on.
Being an adult is more about responsibility than freedom. (When somebody says, “Grow up,” he isn’t telling you to do as you please.)
Anyone who generalizes about a whole group of people is more interested in scapegoats than solutions.
Just because perspectives are changing doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re improving.
Be both pro-choice and pro-life, because the choices that we make in life affect other people’s ability to have lives and choices.
Too few people understand the differences between advice and instructions.
Order makes freedom possible.
Leading a simple life is good. Being simple-minded about it is not.
If we spent more time treating each other right and less time arguing about how to treat each other right, we would all be better off.
Neither “please” nor “thank you” cost one red cent.
Making a generalization is one of the easiest ways to be wrong.
No one has ever made a meal out of excuses.
If you’re going to be a joke, the least you can do is be funny.
One of the hardest things about human life is having to use the past in the present to make decisions about the future.
On Education and Learning
It is not a teacher’s job to tell students what to think. It is a teacher’s job to show students how to think.
Learning is more important than any grade. (You can’t take your A in Civics into the voting booth with you.)
There is no bigger waste of time than comparing yourself to another person.
The possibility for succeeding or failing at any educational endeavor depends completely on one factor: the student’s attention.
Anybody who thinks that the arts are “non-necessity” ought to try living without them.
It takes real discipline to do freedom well.
There are a great many tasks where it is pleasant to let someone else do them for us. Thinking is not one of them.
A failure is only a failure if you don’t learn something from it.
Although prayer is certainly important, there are better strategies for ensuring a good grade on a paper for a class.
Education is not meant to make us comfortable. It is meant to make us better.
The best writing says the most with the fewest words possible.
Be careful you don’t outsmart yourself.
You can’t learn anything until you admit that you don’t know everything.
© 2020, Foster Dickson. The short sayings above and/or the accompanying graphics may be shared if proper credit is given. Creative Commons licensing: CC BY-NC-ND. (Anyone seeking to use the phrase or saying with, on, in or as part of a commercial product must seek written consent prior to use.)
Foster Dickson 