Warships Quotes

• The best ambassador is a warship.

  Michelle J. Howard

  Ambassadors, Foreign Policy, Policy

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  The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Peace, War, Gun

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1966). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965”, p.398, Best Books on

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• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Peace, Military, War

  Speech to American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., 16 Apr. 1953

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• Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

  Novalis

  Lying, Men, Ideas

  "Bluthenstaub (Pollen)". Book by Novalis (Fragment No. 88), 1798.

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• For every advance that the Japanese have made since they started their frenzied career of conquest, they have had to pay a very heavy toll in warships, in transports, in planes, and in men. They are feeling the effects of those losses.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Loss, Men, Careers

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (2008). “Fireside chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: radio addresses to the American people about the Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War, 1933-1944”, Red & Black Pub

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• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Peace, Children, Military

  Speech in Washington, 16 Apr. 1953, in Public Papers of Presidents 1953 (1960) p. 182

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• Surrounded by military airplanes and warships from the world's most civilized and developed nations, we have been denied permission by friendly governments, for reasons of security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still neutral, Republic of Djibouti.

  Thor Heyerdahl

  Military, Airplane, Government

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• No one can claim to be called Christian who gives money for the building of warships and arsenals.

  Belva Ann Lockwood

  Christian, Giving, Building

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• This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Children, War, Military

  Speech to American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., 16 Apr. 1953

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• In the summer after kindergarten, a friend introduced me to the joys of building plastic model airplanes and warships. By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size. The living room rug was frequently littered with hundreds of metal “girders” and tiny nuts and bolts surrounding half-finished structures. An understanding mother allowed me to keep the projects going for days on end.

  Steven Chu

  Summer, Mother, Moving

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• The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships-a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history. Unintelligence could go no further! ... In Great Britain, the situation is similar. ... Until the figures are reversed, ... nations deceive themselves as to what they care about most.

  Abraham Flexner

  War, Government, United States

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• War is an extraordinary condition to be in - to be, for example, in the combat information center of a warship [and behaving] as though you were merely processing credit card applications. [Instead,] the information you're processing is that an incoming missile is 15 kilometers away, now 10 kilometers away, now 5 kilometers. You have to separate yourself psychologically from the fact that your mortal existence may well end. That is the ancient reality of war.

  George Friedman

  War, Reality, Cards

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• We have to be vigilant on two fronts: (1) to not let our anti-imperialism lead to the defense of authoritarian regimes in the region and (2) to not let our enthusiasm for rebellion lead to cheering on the cruise missiles from US warships. These two sirens should worry us as we make our hesitant way alongside the rebirth of a New Left in the Arab world.

  Vijay Prashad

  Cheer, Two, Worry

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• Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name.

  Cleveland Amory

  Sports, Dog, Baby

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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.

  Nicholas Rodger

  Illustration, Naval Warfare, Navy

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• You don't fight to protect warships or old men. Like the book says, you fight to save your civilization. And so often it seems that civilization is composed mainly of the things women and children want.

  James A. Michener

  Children, Book, Fighting

  James A. Michener (2014). “The Bridges at Toko-Ri: A Novel”, p.42, Dial Press

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• Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.

  Ambrose Bierce

  War, Army, Thinking

  Ambrose Bierce (2011). “Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs”, p.568, Library of America

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• It was very much an Australian/New Zealand initiative to have a nuclear free South Pacific. And the Americans were very apprehensive about this. So, I explained to them that, as far as I was concerned, this didn't involve any diminution in our commitment to the ANZUS relationship. But David Lange took it further and he barred visits of US nuclear warships to New Zealand.

  Bob Hawke

  Commitment, Nuclear, Initiative

  Source: www.commonwealthoralhistories.org

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• The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, whilst the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck anyway, and certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.

  Douglas Adams

  Party, Two, Ducks

  Douglas Adams (2009). “Life, the Universe and Everything”, p.104, Pan Macmillan

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• Time that is moved by little fidget wheels Is not myTime, the flood that does not flow. Between the double and the single bell Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells From the dark warship riding there below, I have lived many lives, and this one life Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

  Adam Skirving

  Time, Dark, Long

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• Peace consists, very largely, in the fact of desiring it with all one's soul. The inhabitants of my small country, Costa Rica, have realized those words by Erasmus. Mine is an unarmed people, whose children have never seen a fighter or a tank or a warship.

  Oscar Arias

  Country, Peace, Children

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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.

  Nicholas Rodger

  Kings, Military, War

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• Wealth from trade was the mainspring of Western material advance; the visible agents of change were great guns. These came of age in Europe in the 15th century. On land their potency in reducing castle walls favoured central over local power, since in general only monarchs could afford siege-trains; so nation-states were consolidated and extended into great territorial empires. At sea, guns transformed sailing ships into mobile castles virtually impregnable to opponents who lacked equally powerful ordnance. With the ocean-going gunned warship, western Europe began to extend around the globe.

  Peter Padfield

  Wall, Powerful, Ocean

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• They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.
  The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.

  John Ralston Saul

  Children, Men, Voice

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