Quotes for Neal
 

Some more for the front page perhaps, apologies if they've already been posted:

It is dangerous to meddle with admirals when they say they can't do things. They always have got the weather or fuel or something to argue about. - Sir Winston Churchill

To change something in the navy is like punching a feather bed, you punch it with your right and your left until you are finally exhausted and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started. - Franklin D Roosevelt

My rule is: if you meet the weakest vessel, attack; if it is a vessel equal to yours, attack; and if it is stronger than yours, also attack. - Admiral Stepan O Makarov

Thanks!

“The war we have just been through, though it was shot through with terror of every kind, is not to be compared with the war we would have to face next time. What the Germans used were toys as compared with what they would use in the next war.� -Woodrow Wilson

"In the absence of orders find something and kill it."
–Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

"Aircraft carriers, of course are the second most effective weapon in a modern navy (after submarines). I’ll admit I felt a nagging desire to have some in our own navy but we couldn’t afford to build them. They were simply beyond our means."
- Nikita S. Khrushchev

"Better is the enemy of good enough"
-Admiral Sergei Gorshkov

“The United States will have to understand it no longer has mastery of the seas.�
-Admiral Sergei Gorshkov

There is a word that imparts more fear, honor and respect on a professional sailor than any other word.
That word is,
Submarine!
-Me

Thanks, TLAM :up:

I want to be everyone knows, the Naval Quotes section was Drebbel's idea. Of course, shortly after he asked me to set it up, he ran away to Chicago for 5 months and left me to update it :doh:

:rotfl:

So that's why I never heard from him when I sent him a quote. I'll bring it to the library and post it here.

"That whereas the battleship sea monster we are imitating has been named the Dreadnought-an archaic name-this man o' war is hereby named the Skeered o' Nothin' as an expression of our true American spirit..."-Congressman John S. Williams of Mississippi, arguing against appropriations for U.S.S. Michigan in 1906

Williams went on to say "...provided further, that it is hereby made the duty of the first captain who shall command her to challenge in the nation's name the so-called Dreadnought to a duel a' l'outrance, to take place upn the sea somewhere in sight of Long Island, and that upon the occassion of the combat the President and his Cabinet shall be entertained on the quarter deck as guests of the ship and the nation".

A ship at sea is its own world. To be the captain of a ship is to be the unquestioned ruler of that world and requires all of the leadership skills of a prince or minister.

Col. Corazon Santiago
"Leadership and the Sea"
(From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri)

When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

Herman Melville
"Moby Dick"