Quotes & Sayings About Opportunists

Exceptional performers are masterful opportunists, keenly alert to opportunity! — Brian Tracy

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

Why are our people going out there," said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves' Guild.
"Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and ... additional wealth in a new land," said Lord Vetinari.
"What's in it for the Klatchians?" said Lord Downey.
"Oh, they've gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for northern," said Lord Vetinari.
"A mastery summation, if I may say so, my lord," said Mr. Burleigh.
The Patrician looked down again at his notes. "Oh, I do beg your pardon, I seem to have read those last to sentences in the wrong order ... — Terry Pratchett

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

Immeasurable voids and endless questions are often created when a father deliberately abandons his child. Far too often, those empty spaces are filled by opportunists who see that vulnerability as something to exploit. — Steve Pemberton

Rural Americans want leaders who help middle-class communities to plan and prosper over the long-term - not opportunists who reap the rewards for themselves, leaving nothing for the people who do the sowing. — Tom Vilsack

Please do not think that I am accusing socialists of insincerity or that I wish to hold them up to scorn either as bad democrats or as unprincipled schemers and opportunists. I fully believe, in spite of the childish Machiavellism in which some of their prophets indulge, that fundamentally most of them always have been as sincere in their professions as any other men. Besides, I do not believe in insincerity in social strife, for people always come to think what they want to think and what they incessantly profess. As regards democracy, socialist parties are presumably no more opportunists than are any others; they simply espouse democracy if, as, and when it serves their ideals and interests and not otherwise. Lest readers should be shocked and think so immoral a view worthy only of the most callous of political practitioners, ... — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

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

They were fast-moving opportunists encased in cynicism and proud of it. — Jay Carr

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

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

Too many of the men and women serving in Congress were political opportunists by habit, inclination, and experience. When a president was popular, they crowded in close, hoping to share in the limelight. But at the first sign of trouble or weakness they were only too eager to join the pack baying for his blood. — Patrick Larkin

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

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

Dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

I guess that showed why the Guard mainly meddles with humanoid cultures. We're opportunists, not real knowledge-seekers, and we just don't have the knowledge base to go beyond humanoid contacts. — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

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

Opportunists seek for a chance.
Entrepreneurs make new chances. — Toba Beta

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

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

Wouldn't it be great if all career phonies, faux friends or opportunists could be identified quickly in professional networking circles by wearing signs like "Career Dip", "No Loyalty Card" or "Opportunist Knocks"? — Torry Martin

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

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

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

They are THE OPPORTUNISTS, those souls who in life were neither for good nor evil but only for themselves. Mixed with them are those outcasts who took no sides in the Rebellion of the Angels. They are neither in Hell nor out of it. Eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air; and as they run they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets, who sting them and produce a constant flow of blood and putrid matter which trickles down the bodies of the sinners and is feasted upon by loathsome worms and maggots who coat the ground. — Dante Alighieri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Given the low level of competence among politicians, every American should become a libertarian. The government that governs least is certainly the best choice when fools, opportunists and grafters run it. When power is for sale, then the government power should be severely limited. When power is abused, then the less power the better. — Charley Reese

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

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

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

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. — Ernest Hemingway,