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Naval Quotes

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Naval Quotes

“So Admiral, the marshal tells me your trip to Paris was a success.” Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan, admiral of France and the senior minister in Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government, stroked his cheek. “Yes, all went well as planned, Pierre, although little has been finalised as yet.” Pierre Laval, former prime minister of France and, until recently, vice-president of Vichy France’s Cabinet of Ministers, chuckled and patted his companion on the knee. “The marshal mentioned no qualifications. He told me you had got everything he wanted from the Germans.”

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Book:The French Spy
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“At headquarters I tried to suppress some of the more fantastic rumours. After the bombing of Rangoon and many other places by Japanese Aircraft the local bazaars buzzed with rumours. One was to the effect the Germans had occupied Rangoon. …many villagers were openly discussing their coming flight to distant places of safety. Some hooligans, I had reason to believe, were planning to loot the Indian and Chinese shops and were storing large quantities of knives and spears in some caves in jungle places … One night I stood at the door of my house which overlooked the surrounding country and watched the outline of flames in various directions. The dome of heaven was splashed with a bloody glare as one burst of flame succeeded another. The night seemed to emphasise the feeling of universal unease … Captain Gribble”

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Book:EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942
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“Foundations are key. It's much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things. You do need to be deep in something because otherwise you'll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won't get what you want out of life. You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It's usually things you're obsessed about.”

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Book:The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
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“In 1941, as the United States faced the threat of another horrific war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was leading the nation from a wheelchair. Struck down by polio at age thirty-nine, he rehabilitated and marshaled himself, despite severe pain, to press on with his career in politics. Eleven years later, delivering his message of confidence and optimism, he was elected President of the United States.”

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Book:Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway
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“Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.”

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Book:Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway
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“Being the commander of a Ruminarii war vessel meant that he had risen to the rank by means of assassination and ruthlessness and was therefore implicitly distrusted by the Tidhii Mah’k’hai (Naval Command, that is The Queen Of Suth Herself.) He was expected to mete out, in generous portions, brutality to conquered subjects and to act swiftly and mercilessly in dealing with alien encounters. In short, he was expected to be a bad example.”

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Book:Black Sunrise
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“### Pauvreté de la sagesse Je hais les sages pour leur complaisance, leur lâcheté et leur reserve. J'aime infiniment plus les passions dévorantes que l'humeur égale qui rend insensible au plaisir comme à la douleur. Le sage ignore le tragique de la passion et la peur de la mort, de même qu'il méconnait l'élan et le risque, l'héroisme barbare, grotesque ou sublime. Il s'exprime en maximes et donne des conseils. Le sage ne vit rien, ne ressent rien, il ne désire ni n'attend. Il se plaît à niveler les divers contenus de la vie, et en assume toutes les conséquences. Bien plus complexes me semblent ceux qui, malgré ce nivellement, ne cessent pourtant de se tourmenter. L'existence du sage est vide et stérile, car dépourvue d'antinomies et de désespoir. Mais les existences que dévorent des contradictions insurmontables sont infiniment plus fécondes. La résignation du sage surgit du vide. et non du feu intérieur. J'aimerais mille fois mieux mourir de ce feu que du vide et de la résignation.”

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Book:Oeuvres
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“The most dangerous moment of the War, and the one which caused me the greatest alarm, was when the Japanese Fleet was heading for Ceylon and the naval base there. The capture of Ceylon, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean, and the possibility at the same time of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring and the future would have been black.”

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Author:Winston Churchill
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“I am for relying for internal defense on our militia solely till actual invasion, and for such a naval force only as may protect our coasts and harbors from such depredations as we have experienced; and not for a standing army in time of peace which may overawe the public sentiment; nor for a navy which, by its own expenses and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burthens and sink us under them.”

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Book:Jefferson Himself: The Personal Narrative of a Many-Sided American
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“It is clear that the flame of True Freedom had passed with naval supremacy and constitutional, consultative government from the United Provinces to Great Britain, where it was regarded with quite as much national pride.”

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Book:Maritime Supremacy & the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World
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“It is not surprising that only one medieval state, Venice, long possessed anything clearly identifiavble as a navy in this sense. We shall see that no state in the British Isles attained attained this level of sophistication before the 16th century, and no history of the Royal Navy, in any exact sense of the words, could legitimately begin much before then. This book, which does, is not an institutional history of the Royal Navy, but a history of naval warfare as an aspect of national history. All and any methods of fighting at sea, or using the sea for warlike purposes, are its concern.”

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Author:Nicholas Rodger
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“Whether in peaceful trade or warlike attack, the sea unites more than it divides. Even if it were possible to treat England, or the British Isles, as a single, homogenous, united nation, it would still be impossible to write its naval history without reference to the histories of the other nations, near and far, with which the sea has connected it.”

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Author:Nicholas Rodger
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“'A Naval History of Britain' which begins in the 7th century has to explain what it means by Britain. My meaning is simply the British Isles as a whole, but not any particular nation or state or our own day... 'Britain' is not a perfect word for this purpose, but 'Britain and Ireland' would be both cumbersome and misleading, implying an equality of treatment which is not possible. Ireland and the Irish figure often in this book, but Irish naval history, in the sense of the history of Irish fleets, is largely a history of what might have been rather than what actually happened.”

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Author:Nicholas Rodger
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“In every age states of varying size and constitution and at every level of development have found naval warfare to be one of their most formidable and expensive tasks. Ships have always been large, costly and complicated, and warships much more complicated and costly than any others. Scholars are nowadays inclined to emphasize the power, wealth and sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and there is not more striking illustration of this than the advanced and elaborate administrative structures of the early English navy.”

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Author:Nicholas Rodger
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“Medieval England was a great military power with a sophisticated machinery of government, but her naval administration, at best improvised and for long periods missing altogether, pointed to a grave weakness: the lack of any reliable means of putting a force of warships at the disposal of the crown. Only Richard I and Henry V of all the kings of England can be said to have understood the problem and attempted to remedy it. It is no coincidence that they wer by far the most successful in war.”

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Author:Nicholas Rodger
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“I was standing next to a famed geo-politician when the first news of the Argentine attack [on the Faulkland Islands] was received, and heard him muse incredulously: "An old-fashioned naval battle. A war between two civilized nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and later a peace conference. Wow." No hostages, no nukes, no ideologies, no religious fanaticism; just a fair-and-square war over national interests - hard to believe, in this day and age.”

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Author:William Safire
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“I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.”

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Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Before I became President, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, there had been fairly dramatic, and I think excessive, reductions in the capability of our military forces, and as a former military man myself - I was a professional naval officer, a submarine officer - I thought it was better, on a step-by-step, very carefully planned way, to increase the technical, or technological, capability of our weapons systems.”

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Author:Jimmy Carter
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“...without a Respectable Navy, Alas America!”

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Book:Life of Rear-Admiral John Paul Jones : Chevalier of the Military Order of Merit, and of the Russian Order of St. Anne... : Compiled from His Original Journals and Correspondence : Including an Account of His Services in the American Revolution and in the War Between the Russians and Turks in the Black Sea
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“For in this modern world, the instruments of warfare are not solely for waging war. Far more importantly, they are the means for controlling peace. Naval officers must therefore understand not only how to fight a war, but how to use the tremendous power which they operate to sustain a world of liberty and justice, without unleashing the powerful instruments of destruction and chaos that they have at their command.”

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Author:Arleigh Burke
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“It is by no means enough that an officer should be capable. . . . He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor. . . . No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate.”

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Author:John Paul Jones
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“Growing up in the shadow of Johnson Space Center and moving to Texas to welcome our last moon mission home, I wanted to be an astronaut. Combined with my love for Navy history and World War II flight ops, and unsatisfying degrees in college and law school, I joined the Navy and became a naval aviator.”

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Author:Pete Olson
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