Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
— Winston Churchill
Revealing British Navy quotations
I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background.
My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.
There is no cannibalism in the British navy, absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount.
I'm obsessed with the Victorian era and the British Royal Navy.
.. I'd love to play a troubled sailor or captain or a boatman on a three masted ship.
It seems amazing that the Navy SEALs managed to get inside the compound and shoot Osama so efficiently. I can only imagine they were told that the mission was to rescue a bearded British hostage and he must be brought out alive.
What astounds me about the history of the British Navy is how cheaply we have policed the world for 300 years.
The British Army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.
The head of a ship however has not always an immediate relation to her name, at least in the British navy.
In my opinion the greatest advantage we can at present expect from our Navy;
for at this early period We can not expect to have a Navy to cope with the British.
I've been a Danish prince, a Texas slave-dealer, an Arab sheik, a Cheyenne Dog Soldier, and a Yankee navy lieutenant in my time, among other things, and none of 'em was as hard to sustain as my lifetime's impersonation of a British officer and gentleman.
It was very strange, because my father [ Erwin Rommel] received the first call at seven o'clock in the morning. And [Hans] Speidel told my father, "I will call you up in one hour when I see more clearly what's going on." After an hour, Speidel said, "Yes, the landing took place in Normandy." And the German Navy had told my father that it was too stormy. And that the British and the Americans and the French can't come. And my father believed him.
Military power tends to be a function of economic power, and the British Navy was the essential capability for establishing the imperial sway - which was attuned to furnish the raw materials for the British manufacturing ascendance. So they were mutually reinforcing.