Opportunists Quotes

There's a difference between an opportunist, and someone who seizes an opportunity. One selfishly harvests the fruits of another's labor, the other strategically helps plant the seeds. The latter can be an asset, the former will always be a leech. That climb to the top is already back breaking enough! Don't carry opportunists up your ladder of success! ~ Carlos Wallace

After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road. ~ William S. Burroughs

When the dictators and the opportunists are gone, the cross will still stand before us and something in us will say, 'That is the real thing.' ~ Ralph W. Sockman

I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it's a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don't have the required stuff, they don't have the ideas or the production. ~ Liam Gillick

Opportunists are promoted, realists are co-opted, idealists are frightened and radicals are shot. ~ Heather Marsh

For while libertarians have too often been opportunists who lose sight of or under-cut their ultimate goal, some have erred in the opposite direction: fearing and condemning any advances toward the idea as necessarily selling out the goal itself. The tragedy is that these sectarians, in condemning all advances that fall short of the goal, serve to render vain and futile the cherished goal itself. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Above all, what you have as young people that's vitally needed to make social change, is impatience. You want it to happen now. There have to be enough people that say, "We want it now, in our lifetime. " We want to see apartheid in South Africa come down right now. We want to see the war in Central America stop right now. We want the CIA off our campus right now. We want an end to sexual harassment in our communities right now. Be adventurists in the sense of being bold and daring. Be opportunists and seize this opportunity, this moment in history, to go out and save our country. It's your turn now. ~ Abbie Hoffman

Every minority and every people has its share of opportunists, profiteers, freeloaders and escapists. The hammer blows of discrimination, poverty and segregation must warp and corrupt some. No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy. The real issue is whether in the great mass the dominant characteristics are decency, honor and courage. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery. ~ Octavia E. Butler

But even as every promise was broken, the party kept on gaining followers. Many were idealists, some were opportunists, others thugs. They displayed astonishing faith and almost fanatical conviction, sometimes even after they themselves had ended up being devoured by the party machinery. A ~ Frank Dikotter

There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles. ~ Hippolyte Taine

Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists. ~ Christopher Bollen

Sometimes institutional progress gets thrown into reverse, often when the programmes are attacked by the financial managers, occasionally through lack of foresight and planning and sometimes through what I call 'institutional opportunists'. ~ Gordon M. Kerkham

Prisons are cesspools of corruption, inhabited by snitches, opportunists, and guards on the take. ~ Matt Leatherwood Jr.

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves. ~ Slavoj Zizek

After watching what this purchase had cost Irwin and Linda, Amy and I chose a different path. Love, we figured, may be the best thing that ever happens between two people. And that the best thing is of no worldly worth struck us a beautiful paradox
and an endangered one. We therefore began fighting to defend the worthlessness of lovers everywhere in the only way we knew how: by vowing to remain as inseparable from each other, and as utterly useless to all opportunists, as the rest of our responsibilities would allow. ~ David James Duncan

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. ~ Octavia Butler

I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race. ~ J.G. Ballard

We must walk rapidly but not run. We must not be opportunists, nor allow our enthusiasms to make us lose the vision of concrete reality. ~ Amilcar Cabral

If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred. ~ Sylvia Plath

Criminals are opportunists. If you've got a booming market, they're going to get away with more fraud. ~ William Matthews

Jim Crow and mass incarceration have similar political origins...both caste systems were born in part, due to desire among white elites to exploit the resentments, vulnerabilities and racial biases of poor and working-class whites for political or economic gain. Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate and strategic effort to deflect anger and hostility that have been brewing against the white elite away from them and toward African Americans. The birth of mass incarceration can be traced to a similar political dynamic. Conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s sought to appeal to the racial biases and economic vulnerabilities of poor and working-class whites through racially coded rhetoric on crime and welfare. In both cases, the racial opportunists offered few, if any, economic reforms to address the legitimate economic anxieties of poor and working-class whites, proposing instead a crackdown on the racially defined "others." In the early years of Jim Crow, conservative white elites competed with each other by passing ever more stringent and oppressive Jim Crow legislation. A century later, politicians in the early years of the drug war competed with each other to prove who could be tougher on crime by passing ever harsher drug laws- a thinly veiled effort to appeal to poor and working-class whites who, once again, proved they were willing to forego economic and structural reform in exchange for an apparent effort to put blacks back "in their place. ~ Michelle Alexander

The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories. ~ David Denby

I
lived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairo
was like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were well
mannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I was
different too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were of
a certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend the
evening - the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the Gezira
Club. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties and
drinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most of
the people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threw
them out in 1956."
"Why did he throw them out?"
"He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners got
scared and left. By the way, what's your opinion of Abd el Nasser?"
"I was born after he died. I don't know. Some people say he was a
hero and others say he was a criminal."
"Abd el Nasser was the worst ruler in the whole history of Egypt.
He ruined the country and brought us defeat and poverty. The damage
he did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nasser
taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites."
"So why do people love him?"
"Who says people love him?"
"Lots of people that I know love him."
"Anyone who loves Abd el Nasser is either an ignoramus or did
well out of him. The Free Officers wer ~ Alaa Al Aswany

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom."
Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, reading this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us, consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all casualty, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still. ~ M T Anderson

Without integrity, secrecy can become a license for opportunists to distort and corrupt the system. ~ Monika Jensen-Stevenson

The practice of an offbeat and sometimes bizarre lifestyle, often in the camaraderie of compatible people was incredibly romantic in the 19th century when authors, artists and entertainers lived in the low-class, substandard Gypsy ghettos of Western Europe and were often regarded as nothing more than vagabonds, globetrotters, opportunists, con artists and charlatans. They also practiced an open sexual liberation regarded at the time as quite a new morality. ~ Karl Wiggins

Like the present-day GOP, the Northern Alliance was a loose coalition of unsavory opportunists, interested chiefly in acquiring power. ~ Andrew J. Bacevich

It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, ... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure. ~ George McGovern

In the fall of 1887, Ed Curtis and his father arrived in the Puget Sound area, which was opening up to land opportunists after treaties had removed most of the Indian, and all of the British, claims to the region. ~ Timothy Egan

People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible. ~ Liam Gillick

Ah, reality TV: where opportunists delight in exposing opportunism! It's kind of like the indie music scene. ~ Diablo Cody

It is conventional to tell that constitutional story - of a republican failure ending in restoration - but to do so is to limit the significance of the 1640s to that single constitutional queston. There is much more to say, and to remember, about England's decade of civil war and revolution. Political and religious questions of fundamental importance were thrashed out before broad political audiences as activists and opportunists sought to mobilize support for their proposals. The resulting mass of contemporary argument is alluring to the historian since it lays bare the presumptions of a society very alient to our own. At the same time, by exposing those presumptions to sustained critical examination, this public discussion changed them. ~ Michael Braddick