Charles Lindbergh Quotes

If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

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.

Life without risks is not worth living.

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.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?

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 .

I would rather live one day in Maui than one month in New York.

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.

If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes.

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.

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.

I'm not bound to be in aviation at all. I'm here only because I love the sky and flying more than anything else on earth. Of course there's danger; but a certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life. I don't believe in taking foolish chances' but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.

Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests.

I learned that danger is relative, and the inexperience can be a magnifying glass.

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.

The manipulation of credit has been the most potent of all methods employed by financiers as a means of controlling commerce and fixing prices.We are all consumers and should all be producers.This credit is a tax upon humanity as if government bonds were issued and people were obliged to pay it.

To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.

The life of an aviator seemed to me ideal. It involved skill. It brought adventure. It made use of the latest developments of science. Mechanical engineers were fettered to factories and drafting boards while pilots have the freedom of wind with the expanse of sky. There were times in an aeroplane when it seemed I had escaped mortality to look down on earth like a God.

Pilots are drawn to flying because it's a perfect combination of science, romance and adventure.

I may be flying a complicated airplane, rushing through space, but in this cabin I'm surrounded by simplicity and thoughts set free of time. How detached the intimate things around me seem from the great world down below. How strange is this combination of proximity and separation. That ground - seconds away - thousands of miles away. This air, stirring mildly around me. That air, rushing by with the speed of a tornado, an inch beyond. These minute details in my cockpit. The grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life.

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.

We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values. God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

Possibly everyone will travel by air in another fifty years. I'm not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky's unbroken solitude. I don't like to think of it cluttered up by aircraft, as roads are cluttered up by cars. I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fence lines encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.

I believe the risks I take are justified by the sheer love of the life I lead.

The remedy for our social evils does not consist so much in changing the system of government as it does in increasing the general intelligence of the people so that they may learn how to govern.

To be a true Progressive it is not sufficient to stand up and say that one belives in what has been promulgated as progressive principles. One must be progressive in heart and active in promoting the progressive principles of today, tomorrow and always. There is no resting point, for humanity is ever ascending to a higher and better goal.

It is about a period in aviation which is now gone, but which was probably more interesting than any the future will bring. As time passes, the perfection of machinery tends to insulate man from contact with the elements in which he lives. The 'stratosphere' planes of the future will cross the ocean without any sense of the water below. Like a train tunneling through a mountain, they will be aloof from both the problems and the beauty of the earth's surface.

Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples.

How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of 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?

Science intensifies religious truth by cleansing it of ignorance and superstition.

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.

But accuracy means something to me. It's vital to my sense of values. I've learned not to trust people who are inaccurate. Every aviator knows that if mechanics are inaccurate. aircraft crash.

It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place — it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.

Unless science is controlled by a greater moral force, it will become the Antichrist prophesied by the early Christians.

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.

Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.

History has recorded nothing so dramatic in design, nor so skillfully manipulated, as this attempt to create the National Reserve Association, or the Federal Reserve.

What freedom lies in flying, what Godlike power it gives to men . . . I lose all consciousness in this strong unmortal space crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.

[I] grew up as a disciple of science. I know its fascination. I have felt the godlike power man derives from his machines.

I know there is infinity beyond ourselves. I wonder if there is infinity within.

I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on the nations of the world. To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire.

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.

Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time: it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks.

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life.

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

Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few very far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.

We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence...Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.