Life & Wisdom Quote by Wendell Mayes

The Navy gets its halo and its black eye in the same breath. Wendell Mayes, a screenwriter with a feel for institutional comedy, builds the line like a polite salute that turns into a knife: start with an official-sounding premise ("We all know the Navy is never wrong") and then undercut it with a lawyerly, almost childlike revision ("a little weak on being right"). The joke lands because it mimics the way power talks about itself - absolute confidence, ritual certainty - while smuggling in the obvious: infallibility is a posture, not a fact.

The specific intent is less to accuse the Navy of malice than to puncture its self-mythology. "Never wrong" is the kind of propaganda a bureaucracy wants you to internalize, the comforting fiction that someone competent is steering the ship. Mayes doesn't counter with a grand denunciation; he uses understatement, the verbal equivalent of a raised eyebrow. "A little weak" is a devastating softener. It implies a world where people must criticize carefully, where direct confrontation is punished, and where truth has to be phrased as a mild technicality.

Contextually, it reads like dialogue born of mid-century American reverence for the military - a culture where questioning command can feel like heresy. The line captures that tension: loyalty and skepticism forced into the same sentence. It's funny because it's dangerous. It performs deference while refusing to be fooled, which is often the only available language when an institution demands respect as a substitute for accountability.