Quotes about Navies

Germany is a young and growing empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe. Her horizons stretch far away.

Germany had world power aspirations before Adolf Hitler.

Alfred von Tirpitz

Without sea-power Germany's position in the world resembled a mollusk without a shell

Germany had a very small and insignificant navy. It was Tirpitz who persuaded the nation to develop sea power.

Grover Cleveland

There is not a ship in our navy that can defend us against a first class enemy.

He didn’t succeed until Mahan wrote his marvelous treatise.

Joseph Goebbels

In the long run sea power will be no match for air power.

There were few military thinkers at that time who would agree with Goebbels on this point.

Winston Churchill

The culminating manifestation of naval force in the history of the world.

Alfred von Tirpitz

It was, and is, an illusion, however, to think that the English would have treated us any better, and have allowed our economic growth to have proceeded unchecked if we had had no fleet.

Langdon Cheves

Navies have been and always will be engines of power, employed in projects of ambition and war.

John Hawkins

Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keep good company.

One of the reasons that this quotation is particularly interesting is that Hawkins appeared to be a very reverent and moral man and yet he was the person who opened the Slave Trade in England. Queen Elizabeth evidently regarded the opening of the slave-trade as a worthy achievement, for after his second voyage she made Hawkins a knight, giving him for a crest the image of a Negro's head and bust with the arms securely bound. Queen Elizabeth I, for all her virtues as a monarch, was also totally insensitive to the sufferings of the Negro slaves. Two hundred years thereafter, other English politicians and leaders would take the world lead in abolishing the slave trade.

Daniel Defoe

Poverty fills armies, mans navies.

William Jennings Bryan

If the commanders of German vessels of war should act upon the presumption that the flag of the United States was not being used in good faith and should destroy on the high seas an American vessel or the lives of American citizens, it would be difficult for the Government of the United States to view the act in any other light than as an indefensible violation of neutral rights, which it would be very hard, indeed, to reconcile with the friendly relations now happily subsisting between the two Governments. If such a deplorable situation should arise, the Imperial German Government can readily appreciate that the Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial Government of Germany to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities, and to take any steps it might be necessary to take to safeguard American lives and property and to secure to American citizens the full enjoyment of their acknowledged rights on the high seas.

This was issued in response to Germany issuing a warning that neutral ships might be in danger in their sea war with England -- {583920}. And it was just such an attack on an American Ship that brought America into the First World War.

Reinhard Scheer

An honorable battle, even if it is a fight to the finish, will sow the seeds of a great new German fleet.

The German naval command—without the permission of the Kaiser—at the eve of a losing war decided that the entire German navy would make a grand attack against the far superior English fleet. It was to be a virtual suicide attack on a grand scale. However, most German sailors heard about the plan and refused orders to attack in what was the largest mutiny in history. The German naval leaders then took the fleet out to sea and scuttled all the ships so that the English would not capture them. The result was the same but tens of thousands of lives were saved; many German officers felt that German naval honor had been lost.

Navies Quotes