How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from The Avengers.
Quote #7
THOR: Your work with the Tesseract is what drew Loki to it...and his allies. It is a signal to the Realm that Earth is ready for a higher form of war!
NICK FURY: Higher form? You forced our hand! We had to come up with some way that we could...
Here's that "ends justify the means" thing again: Fury's trying to keep the world safe, but he's using a lot of less-than-heroic ways of doing it.
Quote #8
PHIL COULSON: You're gonna lose.
LOKI: Am I?
PHIL COULSON: It's in your nature.
LOKI: Your heroes are scattered, your floating fortress falls from the sky... where is my disadvantage?
PHIL COULSON: You lack conviction.
For all his secret agent cynicism, Coulson has a pretty well-developed sense of good and evil and right and wrong. He's convinced that Loki's going to lose simply because Loki is evil. And hey, he's right.
Quote #9
NICK FURY: There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died, still believing in that idea. In heroes.
Heroes can exist, and the good they do can inspire more good. That's what Coulson died for and what Fury is hoping to use to get his gang off their butts and back in the game.