Quotes About Opportunism

Hitler, always at his best when he detected weakness in an opponent

Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?

A wise person allows herself to be used when it suits her purpose. She pretends weakness, then waits for the right moment to take control.

When success comes, people can try to trick you or take advantage of you.

Anyone wishing to affect events must be opportunist to some extent. The real dis­tinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

Leninism raised political opportunism to the dignity of a theory.

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

I don't work with anyone out of a sense of charity. I use people as long as they are useful to me.

There is nothing wrong in using people. The success never uses people except to their advantage.

Opportunism has suffered the emasculation of being converted into a principle;

Humans don't share; we exploit.

For the first time in our lives, we were living on the backs of others, but that was how you got ahead in the city. When Jim said it made him feel like a vulture, I told him that scavengers got a bum rap. "Vultures don't kill animals, they live off the dead," I said. "And that's what we're doing. We're not bringing misfortune on these people, we're just taking advantage of it.

It's not my goal to be the main scorer. It's whatever the opponent gives.

You know . . . I'm thinking that maybe we should be the ones to benefit from this motherfucker's stupidity." Trina looked up at Pat. "What, you mean . . . ?" "Let's rob this faggot. Why not?

and being as wicked as any man who ever lived, he exploited his advantage to the full.

The Frogs are getting all they can for nothing, and we are getting nothing for all we can.

He'd serve himself, waiting and watching until he could take advantage. He wouldn't play the fool anymore.

People lie and cheat whenever and wherever there are opportunities. And from these opportunities supervenes recidivism.

As Hans Bernd Gisevius, a civil servant under Hitler and a member of the German Resistance, puts it: One of the vital lessons that we must learn from the German disaster is the ease with which a people can be sucked down into the morass of inaction; let them as individuals fall prey to overcleverness, opportunism, or cowardliness and they are irrevocably lost.

Sheep are funny, the Whitlock said. Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they'll spot that from a mile away. The Whitlock chuckled. They're smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn't having read a lot of big books, or knowing long words...it's being able to spot what's to our advantage. It's got to be useful to be real smartness.

That's the way people were. Nobody believed in the things you believed but yourself, nobody believed that even you were really sincere about it, people believed whatever was good business for them at the time. Nobody believed in anything but good business.

I say yes to almost anything that comes my way.

Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means money.

Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, but any means money.