Quotes by Naval Historians

Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
The history of sea power is largely, though by no means solely, a narrative of contests between nations, of mutual rivalries, of violence frequently culminating in war. The profound influence of sea commerce upon the wealth and strength of countries was clearly seen long before the true principles which governed its growth and prosperity were detected. To secure to one's own people a disproportionate share of such benefits, every effort was made to exclude others, either by the peaceful legislative methods of monopoly or prohibitory regulations, or, when these failed, by direct violence. The clash of interests, the angry feelings roused by conflicting attempts thus to appropriate the larger share, if not the whole, of the advantages of commerce, and of distant unsettled commercial regions, led to wars. On the other hand, wars arising from other causes have been greatly modified in their conduct and issue by the control of the sea. Therefore the history of sea power, while embracing in its broad sweep all that tends to make a people great upon the sea or by the sea, is largely a military history...
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Whether they will or not, Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Organized force alone enables the quiet and the weak to go about their business and to sleep securely in their beds, safe from the violent without or within.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools
Norman Friedman