86 - Opportunity & Disaster

I have long been convinced that I had heard a Ferengi (Quark, above) say that inside every opportunity lies disaster—sorry, other way about: inside every disaster lies opportunity: eventually I went looking to see what number it might be in the Rules for Acquisition. I come across lists of the rules, sometimes with reference to screened episodes and found gems such as

208:    Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer.
211:    Employees are rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them.

but I did not find what I was looking for. So I searched more openly and found:


In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.      Albert Einstein

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Winston Churchill

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

If you view all the things that happen to you, both good and bad, as opportunities, then you operate out of a higher level of consciousness.   Les Brown (the inspirational speaker, I think, not the bandleader)

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.  Thomas Edison


and perhaps this was what I was really looking for:

When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters—one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.  John F. Kennedy

That would be (from my iPhone dictionary) wei1 ji1

DJS 20120531

However, searching again in 2017, I was rewarded with

A)  TrekGuide gives its sources and agrees (as far as I could tell) with list C. That is, A⊆C⊆D

B) this from project sanctuary, which disagrees quite often with thte prvious one and doesn’t indicate the source episode. E.g. it has 108 but declares 4 to be “Sex and profit are the two things that don’t last long enough”. It declares teh 211 above to be 198. This list has few gaps. The lack of sourcing suggest to me that a lot has been made up.

C) This site agrees witht the first but has fewer entries. It does source some of the rules (good).

D)   this, listing rules 1 to 285 and detailing which episode they came from. That’s not 285 in the list, but the numbers go up to 285. As one of the authors notes, it needs work; for example, neither of these is in list A
             4        A woman wearing clothes is like a man in the kitchen
             108    A woman wearing clothes is like a man without any profits

E) a “complete list”, no missing entries. Agrees with 108 of C, but includes 263, "Never let a female in clothes cloud your sense of profits” and 279 “Never close a deal too soon after a female strokes your lobes"

DJS 20171127

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