Quotes about opportunist (47 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle. In every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, wage-labor, the oppressor class is always armed. Not only the modern standing army, but even the modern militia - and even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, Switzerland, for instance - represent the bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat. That is such an elementary truth that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it. Suffice it to point to the use of troops against strikers in all capitalist countries.
A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary Social-Democrats are urged to “demand” “disarmament”! That is tantamount of complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution

Truth , World , Way , Learning

“Those who listened to the teachings of Socrates became the best philosophers. But those who studied under Plato, relied more on the rhetorical path and therefore, the greatest opportunists.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Study

“The theory of "defeating" opportunist elements by the ideological struggle within the Party, the theory of "overcoming" these elements within the confines of a single party, is a rotten and dangerous theory, which threatens to condemn the Party to paralysis and chronic infirmity, threatens to leave the Party a prey to opportunism, threatens to leave the proletariat without a revolutionary party, threatens to deprive the proletariat of its main weapon in the fight against imperialism. Our Party could not have emerged on to the broad highway, it could not have seized power and organised the dictatorship of the proletariat, it could not have emerged victorious from the civil war, if it had had within its ranks people like Martov and Dan, Potresov and Axelrod. Our Party succeeded in achieving internal unity and unexampled cohesion of its ranks primarily because it was able to in good time to purge itself of the opportunist pollution, because it was able to rid its ranks of the Liquidators and Mensheviks. Proletarian parties develop and become strong by purging themselves of opportunists and reformists, social-imperialists and social-chauvinists, social-patriots and social-pacifists.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Source: The Foundations of Leninism, Ch.8

War , People , Strong , Time

“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 (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Notes on the Next War (1935)

War

“The necessity for leaders to possess optimism and ego serves to answer the age-old question: Are leaders born or are they made? They are born. A leader is born with an optimistic disposition or she is not. If she is not, then no amount of "optimism training" is going to make her view the world in an overwhelmingly positive, opportunistic light.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Source: The One Thing You Need to Know (2005), p. 69

Age , World , Optimism , Question

“It was the work of opportunists, crooks, thugs for their own self-gain and interest.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

Attributed to him posthumously by his friend, business tycoon Hari Punja[citation needed]

“In its origin, liberalism had no ambition to be universal either in the sense of claiming to be valid for everyone and every human society or in the sense of purporting to give an answer to all the important questions of human life. … The ideal of liberalism is a practically engaged political philosophy that is both epistemically and morally highly abstemious. That is, at best, a very difficult and possibly a completely hopeless project. It is therefore not surprising that liberals succumb again and again to the temptation to go beyond the limits they would ideally like to set for themselves and try to make of liberalism a complete philosophy of life. … In the middle of the twentieth century, Kantianism presented itself as a “philosophical foundation” for a version of liberalism, and liberals at that time were sufficiently weak and self-deceived (or strong and opportunistic) to accept the offer.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Liberalism and its Discontents,” pp. 24-25.
Outside Ethics (2005)

Life , Question , Sense , Strong

“Strategic intent describes a process of coping with turbulence through a direct, intuitive understanding of what is occurring in order to guide the work of a school. A turbulent environment cannot be tamed by rational analysis alone so that conventional strategic planning is deemed to be of little use. Yet it does not follow that a school's adaptive response must be left to a random distribution of lone individuals acting opportunistically and often in isolation as in a regime of intrapreneurship. Strategic intent relies on an intuitively formed pattern or gestalt”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

some would call it a vision — to give it unity and coherence
Source: Information Space, 1995, p. 36

School , Understanding

“There are two things that need to be taken away. First the lies and this government which needs to follow the law and imprison those implicated in the coup. The chiefs are being used just like those that have been made to believe that there is $6million in the bank for them. This Bill was pushed by the SDL party, the very same people that supported what happened in 2000 and there are opportunists seating in the council looking to mislead the council.”

Frank Bainimarama (1954) Prime Minister of Fiji

2000, Warning to the Great Council of Chiefs, 9 March 2006

People , Law , Support

“I want to make it very expensive for the other political parties to compete. I want them to feel the pinch. Even if I don't win, if they win, I will make it very hard for them to make money. So, they will be splurging lot more than what they are doing right now, and in addition to that, they will not be able to make more money than what they are doing right now. That means, the business of politics will not be so opportunistic any more.”

Dilip Sankarreddy Business professional

From the 2013 speech at Pecha Kutcha referring to his "Dilip for Malkajgiri" campaign.
Speech at Pecha Kutcha, Hyderabad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3MRP2afrYg
Politics

Money , Feeling , Business

“In order to win this war, we need to understand that the terrorists and extremists are opportunists. They will grab onto any cause to incite hatred and to justify the killing of innocent men, women and children. If we weren't in Iraq, they would be using our relationship and friendship with Israel as a reason to recruit, or the Crusades, or cartoons as a reason to commit murder. They recruit based upon lies and excuses. And they murder because of their raw desire for power. They hope to impose their dominion over the broader Middle East and establish a radical Islamic empire where millions are ruled according to their hateful ideology. We know this because al-Qaeda has told us. The terrorist Zawahiri, number two man in the al-Qaeda team, al-Qaeda network, he said, we'll proceed with several incremental goals. The first stage is to expel the Americans from Iraq; the second stage is to establish an Islamic authority, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of caliphate; the third stage, extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq; and the fourth stage, the clash with Israel. This is the words of the enemy. The President of the United States and the Congress must listen carefully to what the enemy says in order to be able to protect you. It makes sense for us to take their words seriously if our most important job is the security of the United States. Mister Zawahiri has laid out their plan. That's why they attacked us on September the 11th. That's why they fight us in Iraq today. And that is why they must be defeated.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

As quoted in "FLASHBACK 2006: Media Elites Slam Bush For Predicting Rise Of Islamic Caliphate In Iraq" http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/24/flashback-2006-media-elites-slam-bush-for-predicting-rise-of-islamic-caliphate-in-iraq/ (24 May 2016), The Daily Caller
2000s, 2006, Remarks at Bob Riley for Governor Luncheon (2006)

Women , Men , Hate , Friendship

“The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent on each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is — insofar as it is thinkable at all — primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensible and effective tool of his research.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Contribution in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, p. A. Schilpp, ed. (The Library of Living Philosophers, Evanston, IL (1949), p. 684). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/
1940s

World , Way , Sense , Appearance

“But here I stop—short of any deterministic speculation that attributes specific behaviors to the possession of specific altruist or opportunist genes. Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors—from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoards through opportunist genes or that the philanthropist gives because nature endowed him with more than the normal complement of altruist genes. Upbringing, culture, class, status, and all the intangibles that we call “free will,” determine how we restrict our behaviors from the wide spectrum—extreme altruism to extreme selfishness—that our genes permit.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"So Cleverly Kind an Animal", p. 266
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Behavior , Nature , Selfishness

“A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.”

A. P. Herbert book Uncommon Law

"Which Is the Liberal Party?"
Uncommon Law (1935)

Life , Change , Time

“The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"The Consumer Consumed", originally published in Ink (1971)
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)

Money , World , Fear

“Kings, like children, tend to be opportunistic. Generosity only spoils them. They equate affability with weakness and hasten to exploit it.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Suldrun's Garden (1983), Chapter 12, section 2 (p. 122)

Children

“[tolerate_evil] What I particularly admire in him is the firm stand he has taken, not only against the oppressors of his countrymen, but also against those opportunists who are always ready to compromise with the Devil. He perceives very clearly that the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Einstein's tribute to Pablo Casals (30 March 1953), in Conversations with Casals (1957), page 11, by Josep Maria Corredor, translated from Conversations avec Pablo Casals : souvenirs et opinions d'un musicien (1955)
Variant translations or paraphrasing:
The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
As quoted in The Harper Book of Quotations by Robert I. Fitzhenry (1993), p. 356 http://books.google.com/books?id=THl7kUfSqCUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA356#v=onepage&q&f=false
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
As quoted in Conscious Courage : Turning Everyday Challenges Into Opportunities (2004) by Maureen Stearns, p. 99
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
1950s

World , Evil

“Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, revisionists and opportunists reflect the pressure of nonproletarian, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata, the pressure that results from the force of habit, from the views and vestiges of the past, particularly those that are nationalistic.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Cited in Socialist Internationalism: Theory and Practice of International Relations of A New Type http://leninist.biz/en/1982/SI507/4.2-Nationalism.in.the.Socialist.Countries

Past

“More grounded, more humble, more selfless makes us more opportunistic.”

Mike Tomlin (1972) head coach of the National Football League's Pittsburgh Steelers

As quoted in "Inside Tomlin's style: Humility, words matter for Steelers coach" by Jarrett Bell, in USA Today (31 January 2009)

“The “democratisation” of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called “Social-Democrats” expect (or say that they expect) the “democratisation of capital”, the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Imperialism : The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm.
1910s

Way

“Tragedy has been and will always be with us. Somewhere right now, evil people are planning evil things. All of us will do everything meaningful, everything we can do to prevent it, but each horrible act can’t become an axe for opportunists to cleave the very Bill of Rights that binds us. America must stop this predictable pattern of reaction. When an isolated terrible event occurs, our phones ring demanding that the NRA explain the inexplicable. Why us? Because their story needs a villain. … That is not our role in American society and we will not be forced to play it. … Now, if you disagree that’s your right, I respect that, but we will not relinquish it, or be silenced about it, or be told ‘do not come here, you are unwelcome in your own land.”

Charlton Heston (1923–2008) American actor

NRA annual meeting closing remarks http://www.nrawinningteam.com/meeting99/hestsp2.html, Denver, Colorado, 1999-05-01; referring to the complaints that some had that the NRA should not proceed to have its scheduled convention in Denver out of sensitivity to the fact that the Columbine shootings had occurred near the convention site; used on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Aug. 19, 2010) http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-19-2010/extremist-makeover---homeland-edition as reasoning why a proposed mosque near the site of the September 11th terrorist attacks must be allowed to be built.

People , Silence , Evil

“The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

(1984)

Sex

“A professional politician is opportunistic and parasitic. For his survival, he must feed off his hosts. To convince the host to let him hook on and drain his lifeblood, the political hookworm must persuade enough of them to believe his deception. The energies of this political confidence trickster are thus focused on gaining voter confidence by promising what will never be delivered and what is impossible to deliver.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Trump Should Triangulate,” http://www.unz.com/imercer/trump-should-triangulate/ The Unz Review, August 7 2015.
2010s, 2015

Confidence

“Explain it,” Hamilton muttered. “This place—this bar. Why doesn’t God erase it? If this world operates by moral laws—”
“This bar is necessary to the moral order. This is a sinkpit of corruption and vice, a fleshpot of iniquity. You think salvation can function without damnation? You think virtue can exist without sin? That’s the trouble with you atheists; you don’t grasp the mechanics of evil. Get on the inside and enjoy life, man. If you’re one of the Faithful, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Opportunist.”

Philip K. Dick book Eye in the Sky

“Bet your sweet soul.”
Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 5 (p. 66)

Life , God , World , Faith

“I'm not mad at Limbaugh. He expresses no shame to the game he's been running for two decades. He's an opportunistic, race-baiting, anti-black entertainer. The popularity of the gangsta element of hip-hop music culture has allowed Limbaugh to proudly claim that his form of entertainment is mainstream.”

Jason Whitlock (1967) American TV person

" Keep Rush Limbaugh Out of the NFL http://primebuzz.kcstar.com/?q=node/20227", Fox Sports, October 13, 2009.

Music , Game , Madness

“The British can sign and find a way to repudiate their signatures. They've done it over and over again. You need to go back to the Treaty Of Limerick. You have Malta and Egypt, for instance. They can always find high moral reasons for such repudiation. They are opportunists. Griffith, however, having given his word, would stick to it whatever the consequences, even though it meant the disaster of a civil war. They knew that.”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

Taken from a 1922, conversation between Childers and Brennan in regards to Arthur Griffith's decision to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), cited in "Allegiance" by Robert Brennan, Browne & Nolan, Dublin (1950), pp. 254-55.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918), Last Years: Ireland (1919-1922)

War , Way

“I don’t think they should be discussing the Bill. It represents the lies of those that took the people into Parliament. The same opportunists are using the GCC to push the Bill through.”

Frank Bainimarama (1954) Prime Minister of Fiji

2000, Warning to the Great Council of Chiefs, 9 March 2006

People , Thinking

“I have often been called a political opportunist simply because I've had friendships with those from varied spheres of the political scenario. It's risky to even have hi and hello relations now with persons from a particular domain. But I think it has got more to do with that spectrum than it has to do with the people in it.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Friendship , People , Thinking , Personality

“It will be shown during the course of this pamphlet that this slogan [A general Election to kick out the Tories and to elect a Labour Goverment committed to Socialism] is opportunist and that in this instance there is nothing to choose between the revisionists and the Trotskyites; that they both are opportunists; that they are not Marxists but petty-bourgeois democrats with near-Marxist phraseology; that they both betray the interests of the working class and serve the interests of the bourgeoisie by acting as the conductors of bourgeois influence into the proletariat; and that differences of opinion and battles of words between them are of no more importance than the usual jealousy between two department managers in the same store.”

Harpal Brar (1939) British politician

Source: Harpal Brar, Social democracy - The enemy within (London 1995), pg. 139-40.

Jealousy

“The further away a scholarly opinion is from direct observation and the more abstract and ‘theoretical’ it is, the more defenseless it becomes against insidious opportunist errors of judgment. In economics, model thinking in particular creates scope for systematic biases… But of course all social studies must nevertheless aim at generalization. It is thus important to be able to think concretely at the same time, as I learnt from Gustav Cassel.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Gunnar Myrdal (1982, 265); as cited in: Carlson, Benny, and Lars Jonung. "Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal on the role of the economist in public debate." Econ Journal Watch 3.3 (2006): p. 534-5

Error , Thinking , Study , Time

“Ultimately, progress in applications is not deterministic, but opportunistic, exploiting for new applications whatever new science and technology happen to be coming along.”

Herbert Kroemer (1928) Nobel laureate in physics

in his Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2000/kroemer-lecture.html, Quasi-Electric Fields and Band Offsets: Teaching Electrons New Tricks, 8 December 2000, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University.

Science

“This is a wrong course the Chinese comrades are trying to lead us on to, it is an opportunist road of vacillation and concessions to the Khrushchev traitor group which finds itself in grave difficulties, and is intriguing in order to escape defeat.”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Enver Hoxha, Reflections on China, 1962-1972, vol. I http://redstarlibrary.org/?p=471 (Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House, 1979)
Writings, Reflections on China, 1962-1972

“The concept of man as mass robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioural engineering in commercial, economic, political and other advertising and propaganda; the expanding economy of the 'affluent society' could not subsist without such manipulation. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 9. General Systems Theory in Psychology and Psychiatry, p. 206

Motivation

“The public-choice theorists would have us believe that nobody ever gets involved in governments or the political arena out of a desire to accomplish public goals…. Needless to say, the notion that citizens would voluntarily band together to fight injustice and poverty in faraway parts of the world is incomprehensible to this kind of thinking. This perhaps explains the frequent attempt to dismiss those in the anti-globalization movement as nothing more than a group of self-seeking opportunists - as if there is some kind of money to be made in championing debt elimination for the Third World.”

Linda McQuaig (1951) journalist and author

All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)

Money , World , Thinking , Fight

“We are waging a struggle against the "labour aristocracy" in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them over to our side; we are waging struggle against he opportunist and social chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class over to our side.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

“No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

On Tony Blair, 1995
1990s

Hope

“In the first place, there is the Hitler group, among whom are the most guilty of the defendants and about whom very little, if any, good can be spoken. By the Hitler group I include Göring, Ribbentrop, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, Rosenberg, Frank, and Streicher. Then there is the group which one might call idealistic. Unfortunately, too many of us were indifferent. Not many belonged to the idealistic group, and I don't care to name them because I think I would be stretching a point to call any of the defendants idealists. I feel that perhaps of all the defendants I was the only idealist, although I suffered from blindness and indifference myself. In this respect, I am not like Speer, Schirach, and Funk. Schacht I consider an opportunist.”

Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) German Nazi official

To Leon Goldensohn, May 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Feeling , Thinking , Suffering , Indifference

“Kristol's warning that neoconservatives could go to Kerry was an admission of what many have long recognized. The neoconservatives are not really conservatives at all. They are impostors and opportunists.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

“We need a corrective on who is a genuine artist. I'm an opportunist. I have no talent. That's true of 99 per cent of people in the British media. Ricky Gervais or Graham and Arthur who wrote Father Ted or Armando Iannucci are God-like as they have talent. Everyone else is a drone.”

Griff Rhys Jones (1953) British actor and comedian

Michael Odell, "This much I know: Griff Rhys Jones", The Guardian, November 5 2006.
Talking about talent

God , People

“In a Thumbnail Sketch here is [the Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness] so far:There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theatre where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their talents may more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves part of the design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Source: Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 253–4.

Reading , Success , Animals , Parting

“When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it was not the act of an opportunistic politician issuing a hollow pronouncement to placate a pressure group. Our truly great presidents were tortured deep in their hearts by the race question.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address (1962)
Context: When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it was not the act of an opportunistic politician issuing a hollow pronouncement to placate a pressure group. Our truly great presidents were tortured deep in their hearts by the race question. [... ] Lincoln’s torments are well known, his vacillations were facts. In the seething cauldron of ‘62 and ‘63 Lincoln was called the "Baboon President" in the North, and "coward", "assassin" and "savage" in the South. Yet he searched his way to the conclusions embodied in these words, "In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve." On this moral foundation he personally prepared the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and to emphasize the decisiveness of his course he called his cabinet together and declared he was not seeking their advice as to its wisdom but only suggestions on subject matter. Lincoln achieved immortality because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His hesitation had not stayed his hand when historic necessity charted but one course. No President can be great, or even fit for office, if he attempts to accommodate to injustice to maintain his political balance.

Question , Heart

“Remember Bulgaria, where the leadership of our Party, took up a "neutral," but in fact opportunist, position with regard to the coup d'état of June 9, 1923”

Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) Bulgarian politician

Ch. 1, Is the Victory of Fascism Inevitable ? https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s2.
The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism
Context: One might also cite quite a few instances where Communists were taken unawares by the fascist coup. Remember Bulgaria, where the leadership of our Party, took up a "neutral," but in fact opportunist, position with regard to the coup d'état of June 9, 1923...

“Conflict, in turn, produces another problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost. This latter point is particularly important. Imagine that two birds engage in a squabble about a desirable nesting area. The interaction can easily degenerate into outright physical combat. Under such circumstances, one bird, usually the largest, will eventually win—but even the victor may be hurt by the fight. That means a third bird, an undamaged, canny bystander, can move in, opportunistically, and defeat the now-crippled victor. That is not at all a good deal for the first two birds. Conflict—and Territory Over the millennia, animals who must co-habit with others in the same territories have in consequence learned many tricks to establish dominance, while risking the least amount of possible damage”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Hurt , Imagination , Learning , Animals

“Be nimble, entrepreneurial, opportunistic, and highly cost-effective.”

Sujit Choudhry (1970) lawyer

"Sujit Choudhry – Founding Director of the Center for Constitutional Transitions" https://ideamensch.com/sujit-choudhry/, IdeaMensch (March 9, 2017)

“A realistic definition of capitalism should not present it as a constant, created and characterized by unicentral thought and action. It is , in essence, the result of the actions of opportunist individuals and groups who established themselves into openings and cracks within society a the potential for surplus product developed; these actions became systemaised as they nibbled away at the surplus product.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution, pp. 82

“If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee. On the other hand there is no more effective guarantee against opportunist intrigue and personal ambition than the independent revolutionary action of the proletariat, as a result of which the workers acquire the sense of political responsibility and self-reliance.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Leninism or Marxism? (1904)

Sense , Self-confidence , Fear , Personality

“These kind never change. The machine does something to a man. It brutalizes him. It serves as a buffer between himself and his environment and he is the worst for it. It arouses an opportunistic instinct and makes possible a greed that makes a man inhuman.”

Clifford D. Simak book A Choice of Gods

Source: A Choice of Gods (1972), Chapter 28 (p. 152)

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