A garland of quotations LXVII

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Unlike the Royal Navy, the merchant navy, or indeed any other institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the pirate communities were, as already noted, democracies. A hundred years before the French Revolution, the pirate companies were run on lines in which liberty, equality, and brotherhood were the rule rather than the exception.
•David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among Pirates (1995).

All the necessities of...