"Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them — as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste – and this was their tragic homecoming.

"They had not been even savages — for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch — perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia ... poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last — what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!"

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
-- Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff

Never let a good crisis go to waste.
-- Attributed to Winston Churchill, but may be apocryphal

Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli