Piracy

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

Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, while the dedicated ships that pirates use are called pirate ships. While the term can include acts committed in the air, on land (especially across national borders or in connection with taking over and robbing a car or train), or in other major bodies of water or on a shore, in cyberspace, as well as the fictional possibility of space piracy, it generally refers to maritime piracy.

Quotes

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

• 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'

• To the mast nail our flag, it is dark as the grave,
  Or the death which it bears while it sweeps o’er the wave.
  Let our deck clear for action, our guns be prepared;
  Be the boarding-axe sharpened, the scimetar bared;
  Set the canisters ready, and then bring to me,
  For the last of my duties, the powder-room key.
  It shall never be lowered, the black flag we bear;
  If the sea be denied us, we sweep through the air.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1837 (1836), 'Bona. The Pirate’s Song'

• When a pirate grows rich enough, they make him a prince.
  • George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (1999), 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

• [The United States] has gone to the extent of carrying out modern acts of piracy, stopping ships in the middle of the ocean and stealing cargo that was paid for by the Venezuelan people.
  • Arreaza, quoted by Vijay Prashad in Why Imperialism is Obsolete in Latin America, An interview with Jorge Arreaza, foreign minister of Venezuela, CounterPunch, Nov 27, 2020

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

• Come friends, who plough the sea:
  Truce to navigation,
  Take another station.
  Let us vary piracy
  With a little burglary!
  • Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, Act 2, Scene 3 (Wikisource)

• Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest—
    Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
  Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
    Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, "Cap’n Billy Bones his song" in Treasure Island (1883)

See also

• Navy
• Organized crime
• Theft
• Villainy
• Violence
• War