Opportunism Quotes

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Opportunity does not waste time with those who are unprepared.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“The four stages of acceptance:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so."

(Review of The Truth About Death, in: Journal of Genetics 1963, Vol. 58, p.464)”
― J.B.S. Haldane

“I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damages morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hung”
― Abraham Lincoln

“There was polite laughter in the courtroom. Bosch noticed that the attorneys -- prosecution and defense -- dutifully joined in, a couple of them overdoing it. It had been his experience that while in open court a judge could not possibly tell a joke that the lawyers did not laugh at.”
― Michael Connelly, A Darkness More Than Night

“Be strong and courageous to take risks.
Without trying and taking risks, you will miss great opportunities in life.”
― Lailah GiftyAkita

“Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.”
― Jimmy Carter

“It is unwise, and potentially dangerous, to enjoy the misfortunes of others.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“I picked up the large lapel button richly worked in purple, green and yellow plastic. 'January 1997,' it announced, 'Day of Visionaries.' Beneath the slogan was a portrait of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. And next to him, sharing the billing as it were, was a same-size picture of our newly elected President. And below was the official logo of the inauguration committee. I’m sorry, but that’s too much. Much too much. I can tune out the Chief Executive when he drivels on about building a bridge to Newt Gingrich. I can be shaking a cocktail or grilling a lobster when he intones that 'nothing big ever came from being small.' I can be receiving a telephone call in a foreign language and still keep up with him when he says that the future lies before us, and the past behind, and that we must light the torch of knowledge from the fountain of wisdom (or whatever). As Orwell once remarked, after a point you stop noticing that you have said things like 'The jackboot is thrown into the melting pot,’ or 'The fascist octopus has sung its swansong.' Motor-mouth and automatic pilot and sheer flatulence and conceit supply their own mediocre, infinitely renewable energy. But this cheap, cheery little button turned the scale. It’s one thing to be bored, or subjected to boredom. It’s another to be insulted. This is a pot of piss flung in the face. What does it take to get people disgusted these days?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage -- but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to
George Girdler Smith
'gentleman'
1799, for
£150)

overlooking
'the town'
sitting there like
the Memphite lord of
all Creation

with my back -- with Dogtown
over the Crown of
gravelly
hill

It is not bad
to be pissed off”
― Charles Olson, Maximus Poems

“An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."
The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the truck was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful.
There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.
Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize.”
― Philip Wylie, The Answer: A Fable for Our Times

“I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can imagine he is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the proletarian Founder emerging all new and respectable under the brush of this capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all his own for reading the scriptures; he tells us that when there are two conflicting sayings, the rule of interpretation is that "the more spiritual is to be preferred." Thus, one gospel makes Jesus say: "Blessed are ye poor." Another gospel makes Jesus say: "Blessed are ye poor in spirit." The first one is crude and literal; obviously the second must be what Jesus meant! In other words, the professor and his church have made for their economic masters a treacherous imitation virtue to be taught to wage-slaves, a quality of submissiveness, impotence, and futility, which they call by the name of "spirituality". This virtue they exalt above all others, and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus everything which has relation to the realities of life!”
― Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion

“An old Russian proverb . . . "Where hangs the smoke of hate burns a fiercer fire called fear."
The trick . . . was to keep that fire alive, but to know at the same time it might consume you also. Then the trick was to make the fear invisible in the smokes of hatred. Having accomplished that, you would own men's souls and your power would be absolute, so long as you never allowed men to see that their hate was but fear, and so long as you, afraid, knowing it, hence more shrewd and cautious than the rest, did not become a corpse at the hands of the hating fearful.
There, in a nutshell, was the recipe for dictatorship. Over the proletariat. Over the godly believers. Over the heathen. Over all men, even those who imagined they were free and yet could be made to hate.
Frighten; then furnish the whipping boys. Then seize.”
― Philip Wylie, The Answer: A Fable for Our Times

“As is the way in political matters, all were convinced that the interests of the community and their own personal interests were one and the same”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“We need to place the noblest and smartest people on top and order everyone else beneath them so that we have stewards instead of profiteers, and make those people wealthy enough that they have no motive to become opportunistic.”
― Brett Stevens

“Over and over again in the study of the history of life it appears that what can happen does happen. There is little suggestion that what occurs must occur, that it was fated or that it follows some fixed plan, except simply as the expansion of life follows the opportunities that are presented. In this sense, an outstanding characteristic of evolution is its opportunism.["Meaning of Evolution," 1949, p. 160.]”
― George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, Revised Edition

“Do not talk of rights, else
politics would start
Scales would come out,
haggling would start”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“After several years in Pakistan, I had learned a lot. When people appear to be really interested in helping you, they are really looking for a way to help themselves.”
― Reham Khan, Reham Khan

“In a complex situation, when confronted with new considerations, Koba prefers to bide his time, to keep his peace, or to retreat. In all those instances when it is necessary for him to choose between the idea and the political machine, he invariably inclines toward the machine. The program must first of all create its bureaucracy before Koba can have any respect for it. Lack of confidence in the masses, as well as in individuals, is the basis of his nature. His empiricism always compels him to choose the path of least resistance. That is why, as a rule, at all the great turning points of history this near-sighted revolutionist assumes an opportunist position, which brings him exceedingly close to the Mensheviks and on occasion places him in the right of them. At the same time he invariably is inclined to favor the most resolute actions in solving the problems he has mastered. Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points. Here an analogy begs to be drawn. The Russian terrorists were in essence petty bourgeois democrats, yet they were extremely resolute and audacious. Marxists were wont to refer to them as "liberals with a bomb." Stalin has always been what he remains to this day—a politician of the golden mean who does not hesitate to resort to the most extreme measures. Strategically he is an opportunist; tactically he is a "revolutionist." He is a kind of opportunist with a bomb.”
― Leon Trotsky, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

“Cast aside any predictions or assumptions that you have about life - what you think is going to happen never does.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Waterloo teeth, so named for the battle when the first human vultures thought of raiding the bodies of the dead for the teeth in their jaws, selling the teeth for dentures.”
― Karen A. Wyle, What Heals the Heart

“When I realized that Unilever owned almost every product in my house, I started becoming more aware of how often we compromise our values for consumption habits, and I made a commitment to at least be mindful of this in evaluating my promotional opportunities and what products and services I was willing to endorse using my name and brand.”
― Feminista Jones, Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets

“Greed is an addiction. It's a machine that must constantly be fed.”
― D.J. MacHale, The Quillan Games

“The shame of it, of not being adequate in this conception of possession.

The value of the entity rests on its resourcefulness in procuring and manipulating material, and so in this respect, the prominence of this deficit serves to expose our deep-seated and irredeemable flaws.”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“...in any society, leaders who are not willing to make sacrifices aren't leaders, they're opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They're easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards. Wealthy nations might survive that kind of leadership, but insurgencies and uprisings probably won't: their margins simply aren't big enough. A prerequisite for any such group would seem to be leaders that--like their followers--are prepared to die for the cause.”
― Sebastian Junger, Freedom

“Society is full of people who are not easily impressed. That leaves opportunists at a disadvantage. They don't know how to market "us" or market to "us" when money doesn't matter.”
― Carlos Wallace

“Leninism raised political opportunism to the dignity of a theory.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“холод в серцях
пустка в очах
жало в устах
всьо в вишиванці
час на таких
час на комах
час бля на термобджолині танці”
― Yuri Izdryk, Naked One