Chuck Yeager

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty. ”

You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done. ”

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since. ”

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off. ”

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up. ”

Never wait for trouble. ”

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. ”

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. ”

There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot. ”

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you. ”