Aviation Quotes
"Can the magic of flight ever be carried by words? I think not."
- Michael Parfit, Smithsonian magazine, May 2000
"You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky."
- Amelia Earhart
"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."
- Leonardo da Vinci
"The exhilaration of flying is too keen, the pleasure too great, for it to be neglected as a sport."
- Orville Wright
"My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home."
- Richard Bach, Stranger to the Ground, 1963
"We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!"
- Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970
"Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?"
- Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis
"I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things…"
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"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, president of Piper Aircraft Corporation
"As soon as we left the ground I knew I myself had to fly!"
- Amelia Earhart, after her first flight in an airplane, a ten minute sight-seeing trip over Los Angeles, 1920
"There is no excuse for an airplane unless it will fly fast!"
- Roscoe Turner, early racing aviator
"The engine is the heart of an aeroplane, but the pilot is its soul."
- Sir Walter Raleigh
