Naval Experience Quotes

There was wildlife, untouched, a jungle at the border of the sea, never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof. Describing his early experience, in 1936, when a fellow naval officer, Philippe Tailliez, gave him goggles to see below the Mediterranean Sea surface.

I was standing on the deck of the USS Blue, a destroyer. We were all alone out there at this buoy, tied up.

If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick.

My dad had a small suitcase stuffed with photos, mementoes from wherever he'd traveled as a Royal Navy gunner. Not that he gunned very much, as it turned out. I'd haul it out and go through it time and time again.

I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

The Navy is very old and very wise.

I never translated from my days in the Navy to being a congressman.

I stayed in the Navy until July of 1946.

Being on a ship is something like being pregnant. You can sit there and do absolutely nothing but stare at the water and have the nicest sense that you are accomplishing something.

I served in the Israeli Navy, and it's not an easy thing.

One night I was on my [Navy] ship... on my first cruise crossing the North Atlantic in a horrible storm, chained to the rails so I wouldn't fall overboard. In this lightning and thunder and hail, in this misery, I shouted at the heavens with my little squeaky voice and said, Someday I'm going to be a photographer! It was as big an epiphany as any man ever had.

All we had aboard the ship that morning was one Annapolis graduate and three reserves.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

Before I became President, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, there had been fairly dramatic, and I think excessive, reductions in the capability of our military forces, and as a former military man myself - I was a professional naval officer, a submarine officer - I thought it was better, on a step-by-step, very carefully planned way, to increase the technical, or technological, capability of our weapons systems.

I have seen and heard a 21-gun salute as my father is in the Navy, but that doesn't mean I don't jump if a gun is fired in my face!