Quotes about shipping
page 4

Bernard Cornwell photo
David Copperfield photo

“I want to tell you why I did this. My mother was the first one to tell me about the Statue of Liberty. She saw at first from the deck of the ship that brought her to America: she was an immigrant. She impressed upon me how precious our liberty is and how easily it can be lost. And then one day it occurred to me that I could show with magic how we take our freedom for granted. Sometimes we don't realize how important something is until it's gone. So I asked our government for permission to let me make the Statue of Liberty disappear… just for a few minutes. I thought that if we faced emptiness where, for as long as we can remember, that great lady is, lifted up our land, why then… we might imagine what the world would be like without liberty and we realize how precious our freedom really is. And then I will make the Statue of Liberty reappear, by remembering the world that made it appear in the first place. The world is freedom. Freedom is the true magic. It's beyond the power of any magician. But wherever one human being guarantees another the same rights he or she enjoys, we find freedom. [The curtain between the live audience and the Statue of Liberty used to hide the secret of its disappearance is raised] How long can we stay free? But just as long as we keep thinking, and speaking, and acting as free human beings. Our ancestors just couldn’t. We can. And I will show you the way. Nooooow!”

David Copperfield (1956) American illusionist

The curtain is lowered and the Statue of Liberty reappears
From "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" (April 8th, 1983)

John Ramsay McCulloch photo
Arthur Hugh Clough photo

“As ships becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail, at dawn of day
Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

Qua Cursum Ventus. Compare: "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874), Pt. III, The Theologian's Tale: Elizabeth, sec. IV.

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham photo

“Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of Parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or to enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the legislature, or the bodies who compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects…What, though you march form town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit—how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty, and resistance? This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious, from the nature of things and of mankind; and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money, in England: the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution: the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as men, as freemen.
Speech in the House of Lords (20 January 1775), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 134-6.

Statius photo

“As a little skiff attached to a great ship, when the storm blows high, takes in her small share of the raging waters and tosses in the same south wind.”
Immensae veluti conexa carinae cumba minor, cum saevit hiems, pro parte furentis parva receptat aquas et eodem volvitur austro.

iv, line 120
Silvae, Book I

Leopoldo Galtieri photo

“I am going because the Army did not give me the political support to continue as commander and President of the nation. I am not one of those who abandon the ship in the middle of tempests or difficult hours such as those the nation is living in today. The people of the nation know this.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

"AROUND THE WORLD; Former Argentina Chief Testifies on War" http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/25/world/around-the-world-former-argentina-chief-testifies-on-war.html, The New York Times (March 25, 1983)

“Traders (like the Phoenicians) carried their methods as well as their wares to Europe by ship.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
Adventures in the Nearest East (1957)

Horatio Nelson photo

“There is in the handling of these Transatlantic ships a nucleus of trouble for the Navy of Great Britain.”

Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) Royal Navy Admiral

On American ships sighted sometime between 1801 and 1803, as quoted in The Royal Navy: Its Influence in English History and in the Growth of Empire https://books.google.com/books?id=mlNnAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA149 (1914) by John Leyland
1800s

Samuel Johnson photo

“No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned … A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

August 31 and September 23, 1773
Also quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

Thomas Henry Huxley photo

“I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Said in reference to those who wished to abolish all religious teaching, rather than freeing state education from Church controls, in Critiques and Addresses (1873) p. 90
1870s

Will Eisner photo

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Andy Partridge photo
Ralph Ellison photo

“Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Richard Wright's Blues" (1945), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 133.

Vincent Van Gogh photo
Tom Morello photo

“Sacrifice and neon lights slave ships don't wait. Love many, trust few, and don't be late”

Tom Morello (1964) American guitarist and singer-songwriter

One Man Revolution.
Lyrics

George W. Bush photo

“We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Speech on new space exploration initiatives http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040114-3.html (January 14, 2004)
2000s, 2004

Stephen Vincent Benét photo
Bill Clinton photo
William Bradford photo

“Behold, now, another providence of God. A ship comes into the harbor.”

William Bradford (1590–1657) English Separatist leader in Leiden, Holland and in Plymouth Colony (1590-1657)

Ch. 6.

Roald Amundsen photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
M.I.A. photo

“Designed to carry heavy armament. Designed for war. A commerce raider. She would roam the earth and do inestimable damage to Yankee shipping.”

John Jakes (1932) American historical novelist and fantasy writer

North and South Trilogy (1982-1987), March into Darkness

Theodore Roszak photo
Pat Condell photo
Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo
El Lissitsky photo
Clay Shirky photo
H.V. Sheshadri photo
Horatio Nelson photo

“The business of the English Commander-in-Chief being first to bring an Enemy's Fleet to Battle, on the most advantageous terms to himself, (I mean that of laying his Ships close on board the Enemy, as expeditiously as possible;) and secondly, to continue them there, without separating, until the business is decided.”

Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) Royal Navy Admiral

"Plan of Attack" (1805), drawn up during pursuit of the French fleet to the West Indies, as published in The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson with Notes (1866) edited by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Vol. VI : May 1804 - July 1805, p. 443
The Battle of Trafalgar (1805)

José Mourinho photo
F. Anstey photo

“Veracity, as thou wilt learn,” answered the Jinnee, “is not invariably the Ship of Safety.”

F. Anstey (1856–1934) English novelist and journalist

Source: The Brass Bottle (1900), Chapter 17, “High Words”

Alan Bennett photo
Thomas Hardy photo
Nathanael Greene photo
Newt Gingrich photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Noel Fielding photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo

“Referring to a professor aboard ship: This passenger — the first and only one we had had, except to go from port to port on the coast — was no one else than a gentleman whom I had known in my smoother days, and the last person I should have expected to see on the coast of California — Professor Nuttall of Cambridge. I had left him quietly seated in the chair of the Botany and Ornithology Department at Harvard University, and the next I saw of him, he was strolling about San Diego beach, in a sailors' pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells… I was often amused to see the sailors puzzled to know what to make of him, and to hear their conjectures about him and his business… The Pilgrim's crew called Mr. Nuttall "Old Curious," from his zeal for curiosities; and some of them said that he was crazy, and that his friends let him go about and amuse himself this way. Why else would (he)… come to such a place as California to pick up shells and stones, they could not understand. One of them, however, who had seen something more of the world ashore said, "Oh, 'vast there!… I've seen them colleges and know the ropes. They keep all such things for cur'osities, and study 'em, and have men a purpose to go and get 'em… He'll carry all these things to the college, and if they are better than any that they have had before, he'll be head of the college. Then, by and by, somebody else will go after some more, and if they beat him he'll have to go again, or else give up his berth. That's the way they do it. This old covery knows the ropes. He has worked a traverse over 'em, and come 'way out here where nobody's ever been afore, and where they'll never think of coming."”

This explanation satisfied Jack; and as it raised Mr. Nuttall's credit, and was near enough to the truth for common purposes, I did not disturb it.
Source: Two Years Before the Mast (1840), p. 267

Indra Nooyi photo

“You cannot deliver value unless you anchor the company's values. Values make an unsinkable ship.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Code of conduct goes beyond legal compliance and every employee needs to be well versed with it.
Quoted in "Fundamentals of India are strong: Indra Nooyi".

Halldór Laxness photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“In this great problem which is facing the country in years to come, it may be from one side or the other that disaster may come, but surely it shows that the only progress that can be obtained in this country is by those two bodies of men—so similar in their strength and so similar in their weaknesses—learning to understand each other, and not to fight each other…we are moving forward rapidly from an old state of industry into a newer, and the question is: What is that newer going to be? No man, of course, can say what form evolution is taking. Of this, however, I am quite sure, that whatever form we may see…it has got to be a form of pretty close partnership, however that is going to be arrived at. And it will not be a partnership the terms of which will be laid down, at any rate not yet, in Acts of Parliament, or from this party or that. It has got to be a partnership of men who understand their own work, and it is little help that they can get really either from politicians or from intellectuals. There are few men fitted to judge, to settle and to arrange the problem that distracts the country to-day between employers and employed. There are few men qualified to intervene who have not themselves been right through the mill. I always want to see, at the head of these organisations on both sides, men who have been right through the mill, who themselves know exactly the points where the shoe pinches, who know exactly what can be conceded and what cannot, who can make their reasons plain; and I hope that we shall always find such men trying to steer their respective ships side by side, instead of making for head-on collisions.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925).
1925

“It was 11:45 at night according to ship’s time when the Titanic grazed along the iceberg that would send it to the ocean bed.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 137

William H. P. Blandy photo
Richard Rumelt photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.”

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

James Bradley photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“I am sure every Englishman who has a heart in his breast and a feeling of justice in his mind, sympathizes with those unfortunate Danes (cheers), and wishes that this country could have been able to draw the sword successfully in their defence (continued cheers); but I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute. (Cheers.) To have sent a fleet in midwinter to the Baltic every sailor would tell you was an impossibility, but if it could have gone it would have been attended by no effectual result. Ships sailing on the sea cannot stop armies on land, and to have attempted to stop the progress of an army by sending a fleet to the Baltic would have been attempting to do that which it was not possible to accomplish. (Hear, hear.) If England could have sent an army, and although we all know how admirable that army is on the peace establishment, we must acknowledge that we have no means of sending out a force at all equal to cope with the 300,000 or 400,000 men whom the 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 of Germany could have pitted against us, and that such an attempt would only have insured a disgraceful discomfiture—not to the army, indeed, but to the Government which sent out an inferior force and expected it to cope successfully with a force so vastly superior. (Cheers.) … we did not think that the Danish cause would be considered as sufficiently British, and as sufficiently bearing on the interests and the security and the honour of England, as to make it justifiable to ask the country to make those exertions which such a war would render necessary.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech at Tiverton (23 August 1864) on the Second Schleswig War, quoted in ‘Lord Palmerston At Tiverton’, The Times (24 August 1864), p. 9.
1860s

Donald J. Trump photo
George W. Bush photo
Margaret Atwood photo
George Macartney photo
Andrew Solomon photo

“The image of the lighted ship sliding under the waves, while the band carried on regardless, captured the public’s imagination.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 7

Alfred P. Sloan photo

“In the spring of 1920, General Motors found itself, as it appeared at the moment, in a good position. On account of the limitation of automotive production during the war there was a great shortage of cars. Every car that could be produced was produced and could be sold at almost any price. So far as any one could see, there was no reason why that prosperity should not continue for a time at least. I liken our position then to a big ship in the ocean. We were sailing along at full speed, the sun was shining, and there was no cloud in the sky that would indicate an approaching storm. Many of you have, of course, crossed the ocean and you can visualize just that sort of a picture yet what happened? In September of that year, almost over night, values commenced to fall. The liquidation from the inflated prices resulting from the war had set in. Practically all schedules or a large part of them were cancelled. Inventory commenced to roll in, and, before it was realized what was happening, this great ship of ours was in the midst of a terrific storm. As a matter of fact, before control could be obtained General Motors found itself in a position of having to go to its bankers for loans aggregating $80,000,000 and although, as we look at things from today's standpoint, that isn't such a very large amount of money, yet when you must have $80,000,000 and haven't got it, it becomes an enormous sum of money, and if we had not had the confidence and support of the strongest banking interests our ship could never have weathered the storm.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 185-6; Retrospective vein President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., addressing the automobile editors of American newspapers at the Proving Ground at Milford, Michigan in 1927.

Kris Roe photo
Ernest King photo
Neil Peart photo
Joseph Conrad photo

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Tony Benn photo

“It would be inconceivable for the House to adjourn for Easter without recording the fact that last Friday the High Court disallowed an Act which was passed by this House and the House of Lords and received Royal Assent — the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. The High Court referred the case to the European Court…I want to make it clear to the House that we are absolutely impotent unless we repeal Section 2 of the European Communities Act. It is no good talking about being a good European. We are all good Europeans; that is a matter of geography and not a matter of sentiment. Are the arrangements under which we are governed such that we have broken the link between the electorate and the laws under which they are governed? I am an old parliamentary hand — perhaps I have been here too long — but I was brought up to believe, and I still believe, that when people vote in an election they must be entitled to know that the party for which they vote, if it has a majority, will be able to enact laws under which they will be governed. That is no longer true. Any party elected, whether it is the Conservative party or the Labour party can no longer say to the electorate, "Vote for me and if I have a majority I shall pass that law", because if that law is contrary to Common Market law, British judges will apply Common Market law.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech in the House of Commons (13 March 1989) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/mar/13/adjournment-easter-and-monday-1-may on the Factortame case
1980s

David Brin photo
Nathanael Greene photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo

“Anarcharsis, on learning that the sides of a ship were four fingers thick, said that "the passengers were just that distance from death."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Anarcharsis, 5.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Morrissey photo
Margaret Fuller photo
Rachel Maddow photo
Nathanael Greene photo
Nathanael Greene photo
William Jennings Bryan photo
R. A. Lafferty photo

“Tell me the truth, girl: how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

"He cuts prices."
"In Our Block" (1965); later in Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970)

Adam Roberts photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Eddie August Schneider photo

“We named the ship the Kangaroo, because we hoped I could get to California in a couple of jumps.”

Eddie August Schneider (1911–1940) American aviator

[I Break a Record and have a Swell Time Besides, Flying magazine, http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Eddie_August_Schneider_October_1931_Flying_magazine_page_1_of_5.png, October 1, 1930, Eddie August Schneider]
Eddie August Schneider explaining why he named his ship, The Kangaroo.

Frederick Douglass photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Ignatius Sancho photo
Hayley Jensen photo
Thomas Moore photo

“Alas! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love!
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied;
That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,
Like ships that have gone down at sea
When heaven was all tranquillity.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Lalla Rookh http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/index.html (1817), Part IX: The Light of the Harem

Edmund Waller photo

“Guarded with ships, and all our sea our own.”

Edmund Waller (1606–1687) English poet and politician

To My Lord of Falkland.
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (1857)

Noel Coward photo
Cristoforo Colombo photo
Robert Silverberg photo

“My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.”

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) English author and academic

Page 74.
Stepping Westward (1965)

William Edward Hartpole Lecky photo