7 Quotes by Alfred Thayer Mahan

Whether they will or not, Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.

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.

Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.

Those far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.

The study of history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practice.

Free supplies and open retreat are two essentials to the safety of an army or a fleet.

It is only when effort is frittered away in the feeble dissemination of the guerre-de-course, instead of being concentrated in a great combination to control the sea, that commerce-destroying justly incurs the reproach of misdirected effort. It is a fair deduction from analogy, that two contending armies might as well agree to respect each other’s communications, as two belligerent states to guarantee immunity to hostile commerce.