Ordnance Quotes & Sayings

Shut up, Ed - the world below us has turned into a map. A real map! The woods look like the "Woodland: Deciduous" markings of Ordnance Survey. It is just as they drew it! Who knew! Who knew you could put the whole world on paper, after all! The artists were right! This is so reassuring! — Caitlin Moran

Boxing Day.
Country pubs.
Saying 'you're the dog's bollocks' as an expression of endearment or admiration.
Jam roly-poly with custard
Ordnance Survey maps
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue
Cream teas
The shipping forecast
The 20p piece
June evenings, about 8pm
Smelling the sea before you see it
Villages with ridiculous names like Shellow Bowells and Nether Wallop — Bill Bryson

The United States Congress ordered an end to the bombing of Cambodia in August 1973. By that time American aircraft had dropped about 2.75 million tons of ordnance, causing massive carnage that has never been fully documented or accounted for. Yet Congress's ban was enacted not out of concern for the Cambodian victims. As Representative Tip O'Neill said during the floor debate, "Cambodia is not worth the life of one American flier." The — Joel Brinkley

I ain't quiet.. everybody else is too loud. — John Entwistle

My father worked at the Naval Ordnance Lab, and they had a nine-hole course on the property. You paid a quarter. — Lewis Black

Ordnance Survey maps in all their shapes and sizes are the most beautiful manifestation of twentieth-century British functional design. Ever since I can remember, I have spent stolen moments, wasted evenings and secret hours studying the mystery and beauty of the Ordnance Survey maps of these islands. The concrete trig points that had originally been used in their creation became almost as powerful in mystical properties for me as standing stones. Bill Drummond, — Mike Parker

Wealth from trade was the mainspring of Western material advance; the visible agents of change were great guns. These came of age in Europe in the 15th century. On land their potency in reducing castle walls favoured central over local power, since in general only monarchs could afford siege-trains; so nation-states were consolidated and extended into great territorial empires. At sea, guns transformed sailing ships into mobile castles virtually impregnable to opponents who lacked equally powerful ordnance. With the ocean-going gunned warship, western Europe began to extend around the globe. — Peter Padfield

I'm an F-18, bro, and I will destroy you in the air and deploy my ordnance to the ground. — Charlie Sheen

The car rolled slowly along the deserted corniche, headlights cleaving its way through Beirut by night. In gentle swerves to avoid potholes, the Mercedes waltzed along a straight road in a dance of death. Sick palm trees and parched grass divided the tarred road of civilization. The sea alone was testimony to God's beautiful creation. But in its belly, corpses, limbs, garbage, and ordnance mingled with a sea life on the verge of extinction. — Dana K. Haffar

There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines. — Noam Chomsky

The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides. — Iain Banks

I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey Maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina. — Bram Stoker

To live is to change, to change is to let go of the past and welcome the future. — Debasish Mridha

Barrayaran warships tended to be not so much mothballed as hoarded. The eldest members of the General Staff were notorious for an attitude toward ordnance that resembled that of a famine survivor stashing foodstuffs, and perhaps for analogous reasons. Ships that most Nexus militaries would have sent directly to the scrapyards were instead tucked away to age a few more decades like dodgy food in the back of a refrigerator, out of sight, before the Staff - or more likely, its successors - was finally persuaded to give them up. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE — Mark Twain

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don't have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy's wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody's weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy's abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.
The doctor's wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face.
"What?" Reacher asked her. — Lee Child

An SJH, in ballistics shorthand. It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body. Innovation wasn't always good for you. The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker's skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape — David Baldacci

It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly, — Tom Holt

Even with the active efforts of my electronic gear to preserve my hearing, the explosion of the drop ship stabs my eardrums. I can feel the shock wave from the detonation radiating through me as it moves away from the source at the speed of sound, and it feels like someone has thrown me to the ground and then jumped on my chest. For a moment I think that the drop ship must have had some low-yield nuclear ordnance on one of its pylons, and I'm convinced that Sergeant Fallon has just blown up half the PRC, and us along with it. I'm vaguely aware that I'm prone on the ground all of a sudden, knocked off my feet by the impulse of the shock wave. — Marko Kloos

I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a child. I did want to be a cartographer but that was partly because I liked Ordnance Survey maps and when I used to go to my grandparents' house from Southampton Station one went past the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey. — Jonathan Meades

She didn't need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel Arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer. — Yoon Ha Lee

Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves. — Adrienne Clarkson

The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God. — John Piper

Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief's life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively. — James A. Michener