Great Sea Stories

“the first axiom in flight school: takeoff is voluntary, but landing is compulsory.””

— Unknown

“While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in”

— Unknown

“The great forces that created the Atlantic in the first place will in time - in a very long time, in human terms - also destroy it. The forces, part of the tectonic mechanisms of the planet, are better understood today than when they were first revealed in the 1960s, but they still present something of a mystery. They are difficult to appreciate in part because they are so complex, but also because of the time scale involved: we are only around to witness the tiny incremental movements and shifts by which the world changes its topography, even though those tiny shifts can often be, for mankind, catastrophically lethal and terrifying. The earthquakes,””

— Unknown

“the lifting against the natural force of gravity of two-hundred-odd tons of airplane and three-hundred-odd human beings to an entirely unsustainable altitude of seven or so miles, and then propelling all without interruption for many long hours, suspended by nothing more than a lately realized principle of physics, high above a cold and highly dangerous expanse of sea.””

— Unknown

“According to many lexical authorities, the word that Londoners used for traders from the Hanseatic eastern cities”

— Unknown

“The last surviving slave from the last arriving slaver died in 1935, in a suburb of Mobile, Alabama.””

— Unknown

“The clash between those who built fortresses and those who drove wagons or sailed ships was a central part of early human life”

— Unknown

“John Ruskin once noted that “to paint water in all its perfection is as impossible as to paint the soul.””

— Unknown

“As the historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once put it: “What is remarkable is not that the Vikings actually reached America, but that they reached America and even settled there for a while without discovering America.””

— Unknown