Film — Live-Action
Superman: You'd risk worldwide nuclear war for your own personal financial gain.
Lex: Nobody wants war. I just want to keep the threat alive.
Lex: Nobody wants war. I just want to keep the threat alive.
"These are unstable times for the Republic, Anakin. Some see instability as an opportunity."
—Palpatine, from a deleted scene in Revenge of the Sith
Literature
One thing Harry had taught me was that, when you had multiple problems, you might also have multiple solutions.
— Molly Carpenter in the short story Bombshells
Tattletale: Funny.
Skitter: What?
Tattletale: Aside from Grue and maybe Faultline, everyone’s already plotting how they can use this situation to their advantage, or fuck over the others.
Skitter: What?
Tattletale: Aside from Grue and maybe Faultline, everyone’s already plotting how they can use this situation to their advantage, or fuck over the others.
"You’re right, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that you use being right to seize and hoard power. And when you concentrate that power in the hands of a few bureaucrats, they get stingy with it."
—Grace Lyons, Shadow Ops: Breach Zone
Peter: And suddenly we'll look around and discover that all the old alliances are gone, dead and gone, except one, the Warsaw Pact. And it'll be the dollar against five million lasers. We'll have the asteroid belt, but they'll have Earth, and you run out of raisins and celery kind of fast out there, without Earth.
Valentine: Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?
Valentine: Peter, why do I get the idea that you are thinking of this as a golden opportunity for Peter Wiggin?
And here, too, is successful opportunism. ('There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its flood leads on to Fortune...') Someone acted on that, Superintendent. To seize opportunity and turn it to one's own ends - that has been triumphantly accomplished - under your nose so to speak!"
WORDS TO LIVE FOREVER BY: When disaster strikes, so do you. Act fast and take advantage of a cataclysm as soon as you can.
—The New Vampire's Handbook
Live-Action TV
"If you wanna make a friend, solve a problem for them. No problem to solve? Create one."
—Michael, Burn Notice ("Breaking and Entering")
"Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder."
—Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish, Game of Thrones
Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish: It is my belief that a moment of chaos affords opportunities lost soon after.
Tywin Lannister: You say that as if you were the first man alive to think it. Yes, a crisis is an opportunity. What other brilliant insights have you brought me today?
Tywin Lannister: You say that as if you were the first man alive to think it. Yes, a crisis is an opportunity. What other brilliant insights have you brought me today?
Kemen: Is it folly to try and stop a war?
Pharazôn: It's folly to kick against the current. You see, the tide may rise and drown a man, or fall and sweep him out to sea. The trick of mastering the current is to know which it will turn next.
Pharazôn: It's folly to kick against the current. You see, the tide may rise and drown a man, or fall and sweep him out to sea. The trick of mastering the current is to know which it will turn next.
Tabletop Games
My sire cleaned up during the Depression: as banks foreclosed on desperate landowners, he swept in and snapped up haven after haven at a fraction of their true value. When evicted renters left the cities in droves, hoping to eke out a subsistence lifestyle on the outskirts of town, my sire was there with sharp teeth and bright red eyes. To this night, he speaks with great fondness of the Great Depression; he tells me he's looking forward to seeing current stock market bubble burst.
—Vampire: The Masquerade - Clanbook: Gangrel (Revised)
Mad mages see a community on the brink - a great place to set up an isolated laboratory or library, or to kidnap those forgotten humans for a battery of unsightly experiments.
Video Games
"Nothing drives down real estate prices like a good old fashioned gang war — apart from the outbreak of a plague, but that might going too far in this case."
—Donald Love, Grand Theft Auto III
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is not my doing! These robots are Dr. Light's creations. This proves he's had evil designs on the world all this time! I, Dr. Wily, have created my own robots to stop Dr. Light. But only your donations can help me complete them."
—Dr. Wily, Mega Man 9
"Already they grow weary of struggling against one another in fruitless competition. Observe the bent backs, the drawn faces. 'Ryan promised us more,' they seem to say. 'In what shall we now believe?' And Eleanor... it is our task to answer."
—Sofia Lamb, Bioshock 2
"One of the upswings of an occult disaster is the window it provides for denying civil liberties, abduction, stonewalling missing persons reports, etc. Like they say, the children are our future."
—Kirsten Geary, The Secret World
As you foresaw, Milord, King Griffinheart's death brings many opportunities for your mercenary skills. A messenger from Tatalia on behalf of King Tralossk has contacted us...
—Intro to Borderlands, Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Our nation's goal was to kill the man who banished us from Erathia. However, Nighon and Eeofol's subsequent invasion has done us an unexpected favour: Erathia is strewn with the dead. For the necromancers, this is a season of harvest; this is a season for war!
—Intro to A Griffin's Heart, Heroes of Might and Magic 3
"LET ME SAY. LET ME SAY [Thanks ]. THANKS TO YOUR [Total Jackass stunts] I HAVE [Becomed] NEO. AND NOW IT'S MY [Mansion]! MY [City]! MY [World]!"
—Spamton NEO, Deltarune
Western Animation
Lisa: Look on the bright side, Dad. Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for "crisis" as they do for "opportunity"?
Homer: Yes! Cris-atunity.
Homer: Yes! Cris-atunity.
Real Life
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
—Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays
Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.
—Ernst Röhm
To be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing, but a good thing.
— The Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
"When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity."
"It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury."
— Jo Moore, UK PR agent, Sept. 11, 2001
Anderson Cooper was in Ottawa last night to report on the horrific shootings at the National War Memorial and Parliament. He was not there to have a kiki and take selfies. Vandon Gene (which is now the scientific name for the douche gene), an aspiring journalist type for the Sun News Network, didn’t get that memo, I guess.
—Michael K.
, "Don’t Ever Ask The Silver Fox To Take A Selfie At The Scene Of A Tragedy"
, "Don’t Ever Ask The Silver Fox To Take A Selfie At The Scene Of A Tragedy"Well, if you listen to Beck's show, you'll first hear about how unseen forces are ready to cause the utter collapse of society, and then at the commercial break you'll be informed that he's selling emergency food kits for when the nukes inevitably start landing on American soil (just $9,500 and you can keep your family alive on freeze-dried rations all through the coming war! You love your family, right?). The other big advertiser is gold sellers, because that's what you're going to be using for currency once the government collapses (just don't ask why the sellers want to unload their gold in exchange for your soon-to-be useless American dollars).
"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters."
