person practicing piracy From Wikiquote, the free quote compendium
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.
PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.
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.
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.