Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. ~ Mark Twain

Pirates are sea rogues who sail the oceans and often attack other ships in order to steal valuables aboard the victim's vessel or vessels.

Quotes

• PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.
  • Steve Jobs, at a retreat in September 1982, as quoted in John Sculley and John A. Byrne, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple – A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future (1987), p. 157
  • Variant: Why join the Navy . . . if you can be a pirate?
    • As quoted or paraphrased in Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur's Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own (2009) by Robert Tuchman, p. 18

• Our prize is won, our chase is o’er,
  Turn the vessel to the shore.
  Place yon rock, so that the wind,
  Like a prisoner, howl behind ;
  Which is darkest—wave, or cloud ?
  One a grave, and one a shroud.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1832 (1831), 'The Pirate’s Song off the Tiger Island'

• When a pirate grows rich enough, they make him a prince.
  • George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings, Davos (I)

• Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919), p. 997

• Inge: Rediker says history has conveniently left out that there were many black pirates. His research of 15 pirate ships shows almost one-third of the pirates were, quote, "negroes or mulattoes." Some black pirates were runaway slaves. Some were sailors whose merchant ships were captured. And many blacks ended up on pirate ships when pirates grabbed slave ships as they traveled from West Africa through the middle passage. Rediker says pirates loved slave ships, and not necessarily for the human cargo.

Prof. Rediker: What they wanted were the ships themselves, which were fast, which had a very great carrying capacity, which had space for a large pirate crew, which had a capacity to feed a large number of people as slave ships always did.

• Marcus Rediker in "Historians Link Pirate Ships and Slave Vessels", by Leoneda Inge, NPR, (March 15, 2007).

• Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
  • Mark Twain, in "Old Times on the Mississippi" in The Atlantic Monthly (January 1875)

External links