Jack Rackham quotes from Black Sails

Jack

[to Gates] As quartermasters, we serve our men best when we rise above the fray and see the truth from an unobstructed vantage.

Jack

I feel compelled to state out loud: life is simply too fucking short.

Jack Rackham

When I came here, I had nothing but my name and my wits. A man in a place like this, surviving on those two things alone, he suffers indignities, slights, ridicule. But I overcame it. I used the wits to build the name. Jesus Christ, what's become of my name?

Rackham

What I've found in my experience is the more elusive the puzzle, the more painfully obvious its ultimate solution. One just has to be willing to see it.

Rackham

You asked for better captains. I give you Captain Jack Rackham.

Rackham

Please, relay to whom you must: Jack Rackham is not stupid, Jack Rackham is not lazy, Jack Rackham is not blind.

Rackham

The first moment I saw the gold on the beach, I thought, 'My God, the things I'm going to build with this.' A city, alive in a place it has no right to be, in defiance of all reason and refusing to be dislodged, but growing. A place that, fifty years hence and when I'm long gone, would force the world to acknowledge Jack Rackham was here.

Jack Rackham

[to Rogers] My father was a tailor in Leeds. As was his father, and his father's father. Time was, if a man on the Avondale Road asked where he might find the finest clothes in northern England, he was pointed toward the shop of a man named Rackham. Then the men who sell wool decided they'd prefer not to compete with the men who imported fine cotton. And as the men who sell wool have the ears of the men who make laws, an embargo is enacted to increase profits, and calico disappears. And my father's business that he inherited from his father and his father's father begins to wither and die. And my father suffers the compound shame of financial failure seen through the eyes of his son, and descended into drink. I'd sit beside him as a boy at the Sunday service as he shouted at the pastor, at the altar--at anyone who'd listen, really--at the injustice of it all. And I'd put his arm over my shoulder as the insults began, help carry him out of the church. God, the insults. At his funeral, our neighbors were kind enough to whisper them rather than call them out loud. So, I set to work, determined to rebuild what had been taken away. I was thirteen years old, but I was determined... until a man arrived at my door claiming to hold debts belonging to my father. Debts accumulated as my father drank. Debts he claimed that now belonged to me. Debts I could not possibly have hoped to repay. Debts over which this man would have seen me imprisoned--imprisoned in a place where the debts would have been discharged only through hard labor. Hard labor with no wages, working at--wait for it--the production of textiles. 'You people, incapable of accepting the world as it is,' says the man to whom the world handed everything. If no Anne, if no rescue, if this is defeat for me, then know this: you and I were neck and neck in the race right till the end. But Jesus, did I make up a lot of ground to catch you.

Rackham

A story is true, a story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born? It's found truth in its maturity. Which if a virtue in man ought to be no less so for the things men create.

Rackham

What's it all for if it goes unremembered? It's the art that leaves the mark. But to leave it, it must transcend. It must speak for itself. It must be true.