Admiral Collingwood Quotes

To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

We're not going to get carried away. Well, we are going to for the next couple of days! ~ Paul Collingwood

I call my dad 'Admiral Ass Hat,' he doesn't really think it's funny. ~ Jay Crownover

By the report which he hastened over to Kellynch to make, Admiral Croft was a native of Somersetshire, who having acquired a very handsome fortune, was wishing to settle in his own country, and had come down to Taunton in order to look at some advertised places in that immediate neighbourhood, which, however, had not suited him; that accidentally hearing
(it was just as he had foretold, Mr Shepherd observed, Sir Walter's concerns could not be kept a secret,)
accidentally hearing of the possibility of Kellynch Hall being to let, and understanding his (Mr Shepherd's) connection with the owner, he had introduced himself to him in order to make particular inquiries, and had, in the course of a pretty long conference, expressed as strong an inclination for the place as a man who knew it only by description could feel; and given Mr Shepherd, in his explicit account of himself, every proof of his being a most responsible, eligible tenant. ~ Jane Austen

If Admiral Tourville's invasion-fleet makes it across the Channel without being sunk by the Royal Navy, and if the Papist legion establishes a beachhead on English soil without being destroyed by the Army or torn to bits by an enraged Mobb of English rurals, then I shall personally carry every single one of your coins from the Tower of London to the front in my arse-hole, and Deposit them in some Place where they may be easily Picked Up. ~ Neal Stephenson

What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

This is Leo. I'm the ... What's my title? Am I like, admiral, or captain, or ... "
"Repair boy."
"Very funny, Piper. ~ Rick Riordan

History is written by the victors
and when there is no victors, it all winds up in the corporate shredders. ~ Neal Shusterman

Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

She returned his salute with a sly smile - a rare enough event that he eyed her suspiciously.

"Admiral Solovy, are you wearing a shit-eating grin because we won here today, or is there something else I should know?"

"There's something else you should know. ~ G.S. Jennsen

The surer of himself an admiral is, the finer the tactical development of his fleet, the better his captains, the more reluctant must he necessarily be to enter into a melee with equal forces, in which all these advantages will be thrown away, chance reign supreme, and his fleet be place on terms of equality with an assemblage of ships which have never before acted together. ~ Alfred Thayer Mahan

Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter. ~ Cuthbert Collingwood, 1st Baron Collingwood

No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books. ~ Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

If her daughter's ship had been disintegrated in space there would never be evidence of it, never an answer to what had happened to her.

If she stopped to ponder the implications she might break. And Admiral Miriam Solovy did not break. ~ G.S. Jennsen

An admiral should be put to death now and then to encourage the others. ~ Voltaire

In this country [England] it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. The reference is to Admiral John Byng, who was executed in 1757 for failing to prevent the French from taking Minorca. ~ Voltaire

Prince Aenys was the first to marry. In 22 AC, he wed the Lady Alyssa, the maiden daughter of the Lord of the Tides, Aethan Velaryon, King Aegon's lord admiral and master of ships. She was fifteen, the same age as the prince, and shared his silvery hair and purple eyes as well, for the Velaryons were an ancient family descended from Valyrian stock. King Aegon's own mother had been a Velaryon, so the marriage was reckoned one of cousin to cousin. fruitful. The following year, Alyssa gave birth to a daughter. Prince Aenys named her Rhaena, in honor of his mother. Like her father, the girl was small at birth, but unlike him she proved to be a happy, healthy child, with lively lilac eyes and hair that shone like beaten silver. ~ George R.R. Martin

Every schoolchild knows that Columbus set out across the sea to prove that the world was round. But the belief in a spherical earth had a long and illustrious pedigree, as Columbus himself was well aware ... "The second reason that inspired the Admiral [Columbus] to launch his enterprise and helped justify his giving the name 'Indies' to the lands which he discovered was the authority of many learned men who said that one could sail westward from the western end of Africa and Spain to the eastern end of India, and that no great sea lay between." ~ Ferdinand Columbus

At dinner one night at Osborne House, the Queen entertained a famous admiral whose hearing was impaired. Politely, Victoria had asked about his fleet and its activities; then, shifting the subject, she asked about the admiral's sister, an elderly dowager of awesome dignity. The admiral thought she was inquiring about his flagship, which was in need of overhaul. "Well, ma'am," he said, "as soon as I get back I'm going to have her hauled out, roll her on her side and have the barnacles scraped off her bottom." Victoria stared at him for a second and then, for minutes afterward, the dining room shook with her unstoppable peals of laughter. ~ Robert K. Massie

A month before the Treasure Fleet's maiden voyage, at the age of thirty-four, Zheng He commissioned an epitaph inscribed on a stone pillar over his father's grave in Yunnan province. He worshiped his father, who had died in battle. The epitaph, one of only three known testimonials from the admiral, described his father's character:

'He was content as an ordinary commoner, but he was brave and decisive in his ordinary life. There was no one in this community who did not look up to him. When he encountered the unfortunate, including widows, orphans, and others with no one to rely on, he routinely offered protection and aid. He cherished the bestowal of extraordinary favours. By nature, he was fond of doing good.'

This revelation of a softer version of manhood as the ideal in much of Asia provided another piece of the answer to the question of how Westerners came to perceive Asians as less masculine. ~ Alex Tizon

Leadership is about keeping toilets flushing," the Admiral once said. "Unless you're on the battlefront. Then it's about staying alive. Neither are pleasant. ~ Neal Shusterman

What are you tittering at, Mr Holles?' asked Captain Aubrey.
'Nothing, sir.'
'Now I come to think of it, I have a letter from your guardian, Mr Holles. He wishes to be assured that your moral welfare is well in hand, and that you do not neglect your Bible. You do not neglect your Bibles, any of you, I dare say?'
'Oh, no, sir.'
'I am glad to hear it. Where the Devil would you be, if you neglected your Bible? Tell me, Mr Holles, who was Abraham?' Jack was particularly well up in this part of sacred history, having checked Admiral Drury's remarks on Sodom:
'Abraham, sir,' said Holles, his pasty, spotted face turning a nasty variegated purple. 'Why, Abraham was . .
But no more emerged, other than a murmur of 'bosom'.
'Mr Peters?' Mr Peters expressed his conviction that Abraham was a very good man; perhaps a corn-chandler, since one said 'Abraham and his seed for ever'. ~ Patrick O'Brian

The admiral, or commander in chief of a squadron, being frequently invested with a great charge, on which the fate of a kingdom may depend, ought certainly to be possessed of abilities equal to so important a station and so extensive a command. ~ William Falconer

The admiral needs only one science, that of navigation. The general needs all the sciences. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The failure of art is, as we have said, not a complete failure. Substantial truth is revealed to us, we are not cheated of that; but it is revealed only in the equivocal form of beauty, submerged, so to speak, in the flood of aesthetic emotion. It is only because truth is revealed in it that the emotion is aesthetic; but emotional truth, truth in the guise of beauty, is not truth at all in the formal sense Art asserts nothing; and truth as such is matter of assertion. To be itself, it demands logical form. Art fails us because it does not assert. It is pregnant with a message that it cannot deliver. To ~ R.G. Collingwood

The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

[Admiral Nelson's counsel] guided me time and again. On the eve of the critical battle of Santa Cruz, in which the Japanese ships outnumbered ours more than two to one, I sent my task force commanders this dispatch: ATTACK REPEAT ATTACK. They did attack, heroically, and when the battle was done, the enemy turned away. All problems, personal, national, or combat, become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble. Carry the battle to the enemy! Lay your ship alongside his! ~ William Halsey

Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. ~ Robin G. Collingwood

But," he whispered, "it was so artistically done. ~ Grand Admiral Thrawn

R. G. Collingwood said that studying the past teaches us three things" what it is to be a man - or a woman; what it is to be the kind of woman you are; and what it is to be the kind of woman you are and nobody else.... One thing I learned is that heroes don't always wear capes... And I learned that big things can start small. Look what throwing some tea into Boston Harbor led to. ~ Kelly Jamieson

The Admiral says that he never beheld so fair a thing: trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours, with flowers and fruits each according to their kind, many birds and little birds which sing very sweetly. ~ Christopher Columbus

Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness ~ Robin G. Collingwood

We must live life in the present as shaped by the past. The option to begin afresh does not exist. The past days and nights were the sacrificial coals that fired an internal furnace. The dying embers fueled my present being. I need to locate new nutrients to revitalize an unfulfilled soul. I seek to unearth fresh energy sources and forge a renewed resoluteness to slog through the remainder of this gaseous and hard-pressed sojourn. Any prior personal inspiration for living righteously was lost on a remote outpost somewhere along the fractured trail. I go on because I must. I trust that if I industrially seek, I shall ascertain a purpose in life that currently eludes me. If I tread long enough, if I assiduously track sufficient true miles, I shall discover a purpose that fits me. I continue to push forward with an unbowed determination, navigate into the deep unknown with the confidence of an experienced admiral who knows that if he endures the gale forces of self-doubt and persist despite all setbacks that he will discover what he seeks. A person must rely upon personal consciousness as a guiding compass into penetrating the unalleviated obscurity that shrouds the way. I shall always resist the easy path, because it leads to an apocalyptic demise. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific. ~ Nicholson Baker

Business cards, of course, are not proof of anything. Anyone can go to a print shop and have cards made that say anything they like. The king of Denmark can order business cards that say he sells golf balls. Your dentist can order business cards that say she is your grandmother. In order to escape from the castle of an enemy of mine, I once had cards printed that said I was an admiral in the French navy. Just because something is typed - whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book - this does not mean it is true. ~ Lemony Snicket

The first recorded use to date of OMG is from 1917, and reads in full "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis - O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) - Shower it on the Admiralty!" The citation comes from a letter by one John Arbuthnot Fisher, who happens to have been the admiral in charge of the British navy (a position known as first sea lord), and was written to Winston Churchill, staunch defender of both the English people and their language. ~ Ammon Shea