navy quotes

Now, Mr Secretary, if you and your deputy will go back to your offices, the Navy will run the blockade.

- Admiral George,Jr Anderson
  On brandishing a manual of procedures to Pentagon officials at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Recalled on his death, 4 Mar1992.

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army 168 and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

- Edmund Burke
  On Conciliation with  America.

My only great qualification for being put at the head of the navy is that I am wholly at sea.

- Edward Henry, Baron Carson
c.1916  Quoted in I Colvin Life of Lord Carson (1936), vol.3, ch.23.

I am the monarch of the sea, The Ruler of the Queen's Navee, Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
  HMS Pinafore, act1.

When I was a lad I served a term As office boy to an attorney's firm. I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor, And I polished up the handle of the big front door. I polished up that handle so carefullee That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
  HMS Pinafore, act 2.

We are†a one-and-a-half ocean navy with a three- ocean commitment.

-Thomas Bibb Hayward
  Congressional testimony, reported in the NewYork Times, 11  Apr.

England's chief defence depends upon the navy being always ready to defend the realm against invasion.

-Philip II
c.1555  Submission to the Privy Council while King-Consort of England.