Top 398 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Aviators - Page 3

Explore popular quotes by famous aviators.
If a woman wants to fly, first of all she must, of course, abandon skirts and don a knickerbocker uniform.
An airplane might disappoint any pilot but it'll never surprise a good one.
Boy Scouts does very well in making Scouts aware of character and integrity and … virtues and incorporate [them] in their lives so that they carry themselves as [those] kind of [people] for the rest of their [lives].
Baseball has been my favorite sport all my life. — © Tom Golisano
Baseball has been my favorite sport all my life.
Prosthetics just felt very foreign to me: You wear them on your shoulders, strap them to your chest, and they're heavy and uncomfortable. If someone gave you a hug, you'd miss that touch. They were more like a cage for me.
If we should have to fight, we should be prepared to do so from the neck up instead of from the neck down.
I have found adventure in flying, in world travel, in business, and even close at hand... Adventure is a state of mind and spirit.
Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings.
There are airmen and there are pilots: the first being part bird whose view from aloft is normal and comfortable, a creature whose brain and muscles frequently originate movements which suggest flight; and then there are pilots who regardless of their airborne time remain earth-loving bipeds forever. When these latter unfortunates, because of one urge or another, actually make an ascension, they neither anticipate nor relish the event and they drive their machines with the same graceless labor they inflict upon the family vehicle.
A pilot who says he has never been frightened in an airplane is, I'm afraid, lying.
Each generation of pilots hopes that they will leave their profession better off than they found it.
Never count on the crowd to take care of you.
I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.
There are tremendous barriers to building housing. If we could break them down, the need for rent controls would go away. — © Tom Golisano
There are tremendous barriers to building housing. If we could break them down, the need for rent controls would go away.
I refused to take no for an answer.
To the question, "When were your spirits at the lowest ebb?" the obvious answer seemed to be, "When the gin gave out."
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.
An hour and thirty-one minutes after launch, my pressure altimeter halts at 103,300 feet. At ground control the radar altimeters also have stopped-on readings of 102,800 feet, the figure that we later agree upon as the more reliable. It is 7 o'clock in the morning, and I have reached float altitude... Though my stabilization chute opens at 96,000 feet, I accelerate for 6,000 feet more before hitting a peak of 614 miles an hour, nine-tenths the speed of sound at my altitude.
My original business plan? To work hard, get 300 clients in the Rochester area, and live happily ever after.
Fighter pilot is an attitude. It is cockiness. It is aggressiveness. It is self-confidence. It is a streak of rebelliousness, and it is competitiveness. But there's something else - there's a spark. There's a desire to be good. To do well; in the eyes of your peers, and in your own mind.
To a psychoanalyst, a woman pilot, particularly a married one with children, must prove an interesting as well as an inexhaustible subject. Torn between two loves, emotionally confused, the desire to fly an incurable disease eating out your life in the slow torture of frustration-she cannot be a simple, natural personality.
I am not going to pretend that flying a spaceship will be as safe as getting in a 747 with four engines for a flight across the Atlantic.
I never was good at learning things. I did just enough work to pass. In my opinion it would have been wrong to do more than was just sufficient, so I worked as little as possible.
There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.
I'll fight like a wildcat until they nail the lid of my pine box down on me.
The Air Age faces mankind with a sharp choice - the choice between Winged Peace or Winged Death. It''s up to you.
I've got tooth marks on my heart.
That distant day had a significance I could not give it then. So we wheeled and came back south towards the city. The Temple of Heaven slipped by underneath, that perfect pattern in its ample park. Then the wide plain ruled to the far horizon. Soon the aerodrome.
I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.
Adventure is the essence of life.
With the possible exception of having more pleasing lines to the eye while in flight, the monoplane possesses no material advantage over the biplane.
Ah hell. We had more fun in a week than those weenies had in a lifetime.
The English had hit upon a splendid joke. They intended to catch me or to bring me down.
Tell them that as soon as I can walk I'm going to fly!
The day I need a television puppet or clown to tell my children what's right and what's wrong, I'll bow out as a mother.
Long practise in driving a racing car at a hundred miles an hour or so gives first-class training in control and judging distances at high speed and helps tremendously in getting motor sense, which is rather the feel of your engine than the sound of it, a thing you get through your bones and nerves rather than simply your ears.
The National Popular Vote is about getting states to convert from the winner-take-all rule. The states that pass the legislation will assign all their electoral votes to the candidate that got the most votes in the country, not just in the state.
My father volunteered in early 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and became an officer in the U.S. Navy. As I was growing up, he taught me the responsibility of command: A leader is ultimately responsible for every aspect of the welfare of people under his or her care. That was a deeply felt obligation in his generation.
Anyone who has been as successful as I have should want to share those resources. Why not give some of it to charity? — © Tom Golisano
Anyone who has been as successful as I have should want to share those resources. Why not give some of it to charity?
Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.
Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.
I don't think I possess any skill that anyone else doesn't have. I've just had perhaps more of an opportunity, more of an exposure, and been fortunate to survive a lot of situations that many other weren't so lucky to make it. It's not how close can you get to the ground, but how precise can you fly the airplane. If you feel so careless with you life that you want to be the world's lowest flying aviator you might do it for a while. But there are a great many former friends of mine who are no longer with us simply because they cut their margins to close.
In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda.
In soloing - as in other activities - it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it.
To be a leader, you have got to lead human beings with affection
Other women who flew were women of independent means. But I had to do something with it.
Everything depends on whether we have for opponents those French tricksters or those daring rascals, the English. I prefer the English. Frequently their daring can only be described as stupidity. In their eyes it may be pluck and daring.
Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.
Are we lost, or are we found at last? On earth we strive for our various needs, because so goes the fundamental law of man. Aloft, at least for a little while, the needs disappear. Likewise the striving. In the thoughts of man aloft, food and evil become mixed and sometimes reversed. This is the open door to wisdom. Aloft, the earth is ancient and man is young, regardless of his numbers, for there, aloft he may reaffirm his suspicions that he may not be so very much. This is the gateway to humility.
By my mid-30s, I just thought, 'This is not going to happen. I am never going to become an astronaut in the U.K.' — © David Mackay
By my mid-30s, I just thought, 'This is not going to happen. I am never going to become an astronaut in the U.K.'
At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.
If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that's just about all. But a direct lift aircraft could come in and save his life.
If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Making steel may be compared to making a chappati. To make a good chappati, even a golden pin will not work unless the dough is good
Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.
The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.
A free ride and free food are two of the three things no pilot ever turns down.
There are two kinds of stones, as everyone knows, one of which rolls.
Of course no one thought of anything except of attacking the enemy. It lies in the instinct of every German to rush at the enemy wherever he meets him, particularly if he meets hostile cavalry.
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