Top 175 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Lindbergh
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and the sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.
The construction of an airplane is simple compared with the evolutionary achievement of a bird. If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.
I've had enough publicity for 15 lives.
It's almost as easy to stand up as it is to sit down.
Time is no longer endless or the horizon destitute of hope.
Aviation constituted a new and possibly decisive element in preventing or fighting a war, and I was in a unique position to observe European aviation - especially in its military aspects.
Even if America entered the war, it is improbable that the Allied armies could invade Europe and overwhelm the Axis powers. But one thing is certain. If England can draw this country into the war, she can shift to our shoulders a large portion of the responsibility for waging it and for paying its cost.
I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
About forty miles away from Paris, I began to see the old trench flares they were sending up at Le Bourget. I knew then I had made it, and as I approached the field with all its lights, it was a simple matter to circle once and then pick a spot sufficiently far away from the crowd to land O.K.
I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them.
Civilization must be based on life. We should never forget that human life was created in and for millions of centuries, was nourished by primitive wildness. We cannot separate ourselves from this ancestral background.
We must learn from the sermons of Christ, the wisdom of Laotzu, the teachings of Buddha.
No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany.
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.
I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
I had four sandwiches when I left New York. I only ate one and a half during the whole trip and drank a little water. I don't suppose I had time to eat any more because, you know, it surprised me how short a distance it is to Europe.
Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.
There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation.
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.
We are in grave danger of losing forever not just millions of years of evolution on earth, but the eons of change that have produced man and his natural environment.
I would rather spend one day on Maui than 30 days in the hospital.
To be absolutely alone for the first time in the cockpit of a plane hundreds of feet above the ground is an experience never to be forgotten.
I know I will be severely criticized by the interventionists in America when I say we should not enter a war unless we have a reasonable chance of winning.
Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
More and more, as civilization develops, we find the primitive to be essential to us. We root into the primitive as a tree roots into the earth. If we cut off the roots, we lose the sap without which we can't progress or even survive. I don't believe our civilization can continue very long out of contact with the primitive.
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?
Flying a good airplane doesn't require near as much attention as a motor car.
National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany, in 1939, less than 10 percent of our population favored a similar course for America.
Real freedom lies in wildness, not civilization.
Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand?
If I must fight, I'll fight; but I prefer not to spit at my enemy beforehand.
Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?
Why shouldn't I fly from New York to Paris? I have more than four years of aviation behind me. I've barnstormed over half of the 48 states. I've flown my mail through the worst of nights.
There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war.
There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation.
I am shocked at the attitude of our American troops. They have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life.
Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests.
You ask what my conclusions are, rereading my journals and looking back on World War II from the vantage point of quarter century in time? We won the war in a military sense; but in a broader sense, it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before.
It is the greatest shot of adrenaline to be doing what you have wanted to do so badly. You almost feel like you could fly without the plane.
We Americans are a primitive people... Americans seem to have little respect for the law or the rights of others.
In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda.
It is not that I believe ideals are unimportant, even among the realities of war; but if a nation is to survive in a hostile world, its ideals must be backed by the hard logic of military practicability.
Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.
I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.
We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.
The Jews are one of the principle forces attempting to lead the U.S. into the war. The Jews greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government. I am saying that the LEADERS of the Jewish race wish to involve us in the war for reasons that are NOT AMERICAN.
Ideas are like seeds, apparently insignificant when first held in the hand. Once firmly planted, they can grow and flower into almost anything at all, a cornstalk, or a giant redwood, or a flight across the ocean. Whatever a man imagines, he can achieve.
Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see .
Pilots are drawn to flying because it's a perfect combination of science, romance and adventure.
Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.
I don't believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished if we don't take any chances at all.
Life without risks is not worth living.
If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes.
In a time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda.
Unless science is controlled by a greater moral force, it will become the Antichrist prophesied by the early Christians.
Success is not measured by what a man accomplishes, but by the opposition he has encountered and the courage with which he has maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.
I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many -- myself and humanity in flux.
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