"Opportunism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still remains the sense of 'command' in 'Empire;' and in the past history of our Government of the Cape Colony there has been too little wholesome command and obedience, and too much opportunism, shuffling off of responsibility, with self-sufficient ignorance and doctrinaire foolishness taking the place of knowledge and insight. Want of courage is, I think, in short, at the bottom of the ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... he was engaged in endeavoring to persuade others to adopt his policies, regardless of the fact that opposed policies might be supported by as much if not even by more logic. Bismarck always justified his opportunism by saying that his sense of duty was superior to his private feelings of love or hate; however, his attitude was uniformly directed for or against conditions in proportion as, to his mind, they were charged with good or evil for his ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... deficiency of things in accordance with nature. It might thus be a propriety for the sage in spite of his happiness, to depart from life of his own accord, and for the fool notwithstanding his misery, to remain in it. Life, being in itself indifferent, the whole question was one of opportunism. Wisdom might prompt the leaving herself should occasion seem ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... McKinley's name to its exact altitude on the roll of America's illustrious men. Ardent eulogists spoke of him as beside the nation's greatest statesman, Lincoln, while his most pronounced opponents in life accorded him very high honor. During his career he had been accused of opportunism, of inconsistency, of partiality to the moneyed interests of the country. His views of great public questions underwent change. One of his altered attitudes, much remarked upon, that concerning silver, involved, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... more permanent work were not generally good. The institution was based upon the assumption that the Negro race must be protected from the white race. In its organization and administration it was an impossible combination of the practical and the theoretical, of opportunism and humanitarianism, of common sense and idealism. It failed to exert a permanently wholesome influence because its lesser agents were not held to strict accountability by their superiors. Under these agents the ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... abundance of life. Wrong action brings narrowness, decay, and degeneration. A man must have principles of life above all questions of the mere opportunities of to-day, but these principles are themselves derived from experience. They belong to the higher opportunism, the consideration of what is best in the long run. The man who is controlled by an arbitrary system without reference to conditions, is ineffective. He becomes a crank, a fanatic, a man whose aims are out of all proportion to ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... more illogical proceeding? And here follows the treatise,—a Defense of Results, an Apology for Opportunism,—conceived in agreeable procrastination, devoted to the praise of the inconsequential angleworm, and dedicated to a childish memory of a whistling ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... immediately. "I have always been certain that you could," said he. He went on to expound to Thyrsis the ethics of opportunism—how it would not be necessary to be false to his convictions, to write anything that he did not believe—but simply to put his convictions into a popular form, and to impart no more than the public could swallow at the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... must resist the base opportunism which would abandon our strong position of devotion to these fundamental principles of good government for the sake of gaining temporary strength from some passing passion of the hour. To identify our party with an idea which springs ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... bring about the great coalition war in 1863 was a "Yes" instead of a "No" from His Majesty the King in Gastein. Anybody but a German minister would perhaps have counseled affirmatively, from reasons of utility and opportunism in order to solve thereby our home difficulties. You see neither our own people nor foreigners really have a proper appreciation of the amount of national loyalty and high principles which guides both the sovereign and his ministers in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... [FN346] The "opportunism" of Mohammed has been made a matter of obloquy by many who have not reflected and discovered that time-serving is the very essence of "Revelation." Says the Rev. W. Smith ("Pentateuch," chaps. xiii.), "As the journey (Exodus) proceeds, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. After the introduction of the Home Rule Bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend, to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in opportunism[112] and whose talents he admired. Yet for a certain kind of opportunism—that which conserves rather than destroys—Browning thought that much might fairly be said. To say this with a special reference to the fallen Emperor of France he ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... that books on the art of war were not worth reading. With blind persistency, they adduce the example of Chao Kua, who pored over his father's books to no purpose, [67] as a proof that all military theory is useless. Again, seeing that books on war have to do with such things as opportunism in designing plans, and the conversion of spies, they hold that the art is immoral and unworthy of a sage. These people ignore the fact that the studies of our scholars and the civil administration of our officials also ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... principal prop during the years of agony and disaster, Lloyd George is, in the last analysis, merely an eloquent and spectacular politician with the genius of opportunism. One reason why he holds his post is that there is no one to take his place,—another commentary on the paucity of greatness. There is no visible heir to Venizelos. Besides, Greece is a small country without ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... England; but even of these few a great number, probably the majority, opposed it for reasons not only different but almost contrary to ours. Many were Pacifists, most were Cobdenites; the wisest were healthy but hazy Liberals who rightly felt the tradition of Gladstone to be a safer thing than the opportunism of the Liberal Imperialist. But we might, in one very real sense, be more strictly described as Pro-Boers. That is, we were much more insistent that the Boers were right in fighting than that the English were wrong in fighting. We disliked cosmopolitan peace almost as much as cosmopolitan ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... new standpoint may be suggestive and interesting. Assuredly it is only by some such general revision, if not on these lines then on others, that a practicable way of escape is to be found for any one, from that base and shifty opportunism in public and social matters, that predominance of fluctuating aims and spiritless conformities, in which so many of us, without any great positive happiness at all to reward us for the sacrifice we are making, bury the solitary ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... It regards "philosophy" as the most difficult of all "works of art." What it seems to be suspicious of in pragmatism is a tendency to seek mediocrity rather than beauty, and a certain humorous opportunism rather than the quiet of an eternal vision. It seems to look in vain in "Pragmatism" for that element of the impossible, for that strain of Quixotic faith, in which no high work of art is found to be lacking. It seems unable to discover in the pragmatic attitude that ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... strike, ceasing work suddenly when he knows his employer has orders that must be immediately filled; or in a temporary strike, quitting work one day and coming back the next. His weapon is organized opportunism, wielding an unexpected blow, and keeping the employer in a frenzy ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... confidence in organized religion largely brought about by organized religion itself through the methods it has pursued during the last two or three generations. There is a widespread belief that it is compromising with the world; that it is playing fast and loose with faith and discipline in a vain opportunism that voids it of spiritual power. Even where distrust does not reach this disastrous conclusion, there is a growing feeling of repugnance to the methods now being adopted in high quarters to "sell religion" to the public, as is the phrase which is sufficient in itself ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... derived from the sane application of our knowledge of Darwinism to history are even now just beginning to penetrate the current literature of war and peace. In public affairs most nations have followed the principle of opportunism, "striking while the iron is hot," without regard to future results, whether of financial ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Young Czech Party before its dissolution, Dr. Kramar openly declared that "at the moment of the outbreak of the war it became quite clear that, despite all tactics of opportunism, our party remained true to the programme of Czech independence. It became at once evident to all of us that the chapter of our former policy was forever closed for us. We felt with our whole soul ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek |
