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Unselfishly, you left your fathers and your mothers,
You left behind your sisters and your brothers.
Leaving your beloved children and wives,
You put on hold, your dreams
-Anon.
In Your Honor
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There is something about going to sea. A little bit of discipline, self-discipline and humility are required.
-Prince Andrew
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I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.
-Clara Barton
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Valor, glory, firmness, skill, generosity, steadiness in battle and ability to rule -- these constitute the duty of a soldier. They flow from his own nature.
-Bhagavad Gita
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How happy is the sailor's life, from coast to coast to roam; in every port he finds a wife, in every land a home.
-Isaac Bickerstaffe
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Admiral. That part of a warship which does the talking while the figurehead does the thinking.
-Ambrose Bierce
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With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
written as a reaction to the high casualty rates of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons and Le Cateau
-Laurence Robert Binyon
For the Fallen (Sept. 21, 1914), September 21, 1914
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The Royal Navy of England hath ever been its greatest defense and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island.
-William Blackstone
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I made all my generals out of mud.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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The greatest general is he who makes the fewest mistakes.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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I am convinced that the best service a retired general can perform is to turn in his tongue along with his suit, and to mothball his opinions.
-Omar Bradley
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In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.
-Edmund Burke
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What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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The General Order is always to maneuver in a body and on the attack; to maintain strict but not pettifogging discipline; to keep the troops constantly at the ready; to employ the utmost vigilance on sentry go; to use the bayonet on every possible occasion; and to follow up the enemy remorselessly until he is utterly destroyed.
-Lazare Carnot
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Iconic clothing has been secularized. A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative color and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
-Angela Carter
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Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.
-G. K. Chesterton
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The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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War is too important a matter to be left to the military.
-Georges Clemenceau
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There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
-Joseph Conrad
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The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.
-Calvin Coolidge
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I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.
-Oliver Cromwell
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Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?
-Daniel Daly
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We know, Mr. Weller -- we, who are men of the world -- that a good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.
-Charles Dickens
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I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman. I would know him, that would refuse to set his hand to a rope, but I know there is not any such here.
-Sir Francis Drake
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Drinking is the soldier's pleasure.
-John Dryden
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Books about Military, the
