Aviation Quotes - Page 7

• In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.

  Robert Benchley

  Travel, Children, Airplane

  Pluck and Luck (1925)

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• To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.

  Nevil Shute

  Airplane, Climbing, Flying

  Nevil Shute (1954). “Slide rule: the autobiography of an engineer”

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• Unlike the boundaries of the sea by the shorelines, the "ocean of air" laps at the border of every state, city, town and home throughout the world.

  L. Welch Pogue

  Ocean, Home, Airplane

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• Every flyer who ventures across oceans to distant lands is a potential explorer; in his or her breast burns the same fire that urged adventurers of old to set forth in their sailing-ships for foreign lands.

  Jean Batten

  Travel, Ocean, Airplane

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• Dad, I left my heart up there.

  Francis Gary Powers

  Dad, Heart, Flight

  Francis Gary Powers, Curt Gentry (2004). “Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident”, p.4, Potomac Books, Inc.

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• I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Art, Wine, Years

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• Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?

  Charles Lindbergh

  Beauty, Adventure, Flying

  Charles A. Lindbergh, Reeve Lindbergh (2003). “The Spirit of St. Louis”, p.261, Simon and Schuster

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• Nobody who has not been up in the sky on a glorious morning can possibly imagine the way a pilot feels in free heaven.

  William T. Piper

  Morning, Sky, Heaven

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• 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.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Children, Adventure, Flames

  Charles Lindbergh, “Untitled”

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• If black boxes survive air crashes - why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

  George Carlin

  Funny, Travel, Airplane

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• He knew that we gave constant lip service to the dictates of safety and howled like Christians condemned to the arena if any compromise were made of it. He knew we were seekers after ease, suspicious, egotistic, and stubborn to a fault. He also knew that none of us would have continued our careers unless we had always been, and still were, helpless before this opportunity to take a chance.

  Ernest K. Gann

  Christian, Opportunity, Careers

  Ernest K. Gann (1986). “Fate is the Hunter: A Pilot's Memoir”, p.178, Simon and Schuster

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• Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.

  Richard Bach

  Writing, Airplane, Giving

  Richard Bach (2012). “A Gift of Wings”, p.94, Dell

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• Father, we thank you, especially for letting me fly this flight - for the privilege of being able to be in this position, to be in this wondrous place, seeing all these many startling, wonderful things that you have created.

  Gordon Cooper

  Thank You, Father, Able

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• The spacious firmament on high,
  And all the blue ethereal sky,
  And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
  Their great Original proclaim.

  Joseph Addison

  Blue, Sky, Shining

  'The Spectator' no. 465, 23 August 1712, 'Ode'

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• The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Night, Blue, Dragons

  "'Terre des Hommes' ('Wind, Sand and Stars')". Book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Lewis Galantière. Chapter I: "The Craft", 1939.

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• Airshow flying is tough, it's even tougher if you do something stupid. Don't do nuthin dumb!

  Ralph Royce

  Stupid, Flying, Dumb

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• Pilots track their lives by the number of hours in the air, as if any other kind of time isn't worth noting.

  Michael Parfit

  Numbers, Air, Track

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• As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] dimished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.

  James Irwin

  Beautiful, Fall, Men

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• The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.

  Jonathan Swift

  Funny, Thinking, Flying

  "Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies". Book by Jonathan Swift, 1711-1726.

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• Everything I had ever learned about air fighting taught me that the man who is aggressive, who pushes a fight, is the pilot who is successful in combat and who has the best opportunity for surviving battle and coming home.

  Robert S. Johnson

  Home, Fighting, Successful

  Robert S. Johnson, Martin Caidin “Thunderbolt! The Extraordinary Story of a World War II Ace”, Lulu.com

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• My father had been opposed to my flying from the first and had never flown himself. However, he had agreed to go up with me at the first opportunity, and one afternoon he climbed into the cockpit and we flew over the Redwood Falls together. From that day on I never heard a word against my flying and he never missed a chance to ride in the plane.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Father, Fall, Opportunity

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• The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Song, Jobs, Night

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• How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem I do not know; I hope, as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars' both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.

  Robert H. Goddard

  Stars, Years, Long

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• Fly, dotard, fly! With thy wise dreams and fables of the sky.

  Alexander Pope

  Wise, Dream, Sky

  Alexander Pope (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Alexander Pope (Illustrated)”, p.1130, Delphi Classics

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• The airplane is just a bunch of sticks and wires and cloth, a tool for learning about the sky and about what kind of person I am, when I fly. An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding. Those things aren't destructable.

  Richard Bach

  Airplane, Sky, Joy

  Richard Bach (2012). “Nothing By Chance”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

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