Pragmatism is not always a good thing. Experience is not always a good thing.
No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.
For not all things are practicable on identical principles
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
Shall we ever have the government that will not be satisfied to be practical? .... Who can estimate all that the practical people have done to us.
In this work I have received the opposition of a number of men who only advocate the unobtainable because the immediately possible is beyond their moral courage, administrative ability, and their political prescience.
I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.
I found filmmaking to be a very practical art form. It's about figuring out how to create within the very practical limitations/constraints of time, money, and large groups of collaborators.
When Jeff Sachs says every poor person should receive a free bed net, I agree - but in reality, many end up not receiving one. And I don't live in a world of shoulds.
'The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.
Even if we were able to agree on an ideal set of immigration laws, enforcing such laws in the face of hundreds of thousands of cases is impossible in practice.
