This saying appears to be due to John Augustus Shedd; it was quoted in "Grace Hopper : The Youthful Teacher of Us All" by Henry S. Tropp in Abacus Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Fall 1984) ISSN 0724-6722 . She did repeat this saying on multiple occasions, but she called it "a motto that has stuck with me" and did not claim coinage. Additional variations and citations may be found at Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/09/safe-harbor/
Misattributed
“And pray, what in sea language is meant by a ship?”
"She must have three square-rigged masts, sir," they told him kindly, "and a bowsprit; and the masts must be in three - lower, top and topgallant - for we never call a polacre a ship."
Master and Commander (1970)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Patrick O'Brian 14
English novelist 1914–2000Related quotes
“If you know how to launch your ship into God's sea
Oh, what a blessed fate, submerged in it to be”
The Cherubinic Wanderer
“I was floating in a peaceful sea, rescued by a sinking ship.”
January 1979.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)
“Guarded with ships, and all our sea our own.”
To My Lord of Falkland.
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (1857)
Lady Wentworth.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“The Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea around us.”
As quoted in Frederick Douglass American Hero http://books.google.com/books?id=9ykO8sKDE30C&pg=PA276&lpg=PA276&dq=%22I+know+the+man.+I+like+a+man+in+the+Presidential+chair%22&source=bl&ots=0JRNsxNa8j&sig=UJpkupLqhe7-DOrhKxCYSCo7EcY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FA9lU5z5JsnQsQTM1YH4CA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22I%20know%20the%20man.%20I%20like%20a%20man%20in%20the%20Presidential%20chair%22&f=false (2008), by Connie A. Miller, Sr., p. 277
Variant: For colored men the Republican party is the deck, all outside is the sea.
“A spark without its fire, a drop without its sea,
Without rebirth what more, pray, wouldst thou be?”
The Cherubinic Wanderer
“…like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung.”
Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)
“Every man prays in his own language.”
Section title and eponymous song of A Concert of Sacred Music (1965).