All that I am ... I owe to the Air Force.

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.

Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.

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

If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.

Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always a high priority in whatever I was doing.

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.

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.

The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.

The value of surrounding yourself with positive people is not what you get from them, but how good a person you have become because of them.

The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.

How can the face that welcomed me into the world be the face I'll soon forget? How can the body I came through be the body I don't really know?

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all.

They say in the darkest night there is a light beyond

Falling in love is like eating mushrooms, you never know if it's the real thing until it's too late.

A precisian professor had the habit of saying: "... quartic polynomial ax^4+bx^3+cx^2+dx+e , where e need not be the base of the natural logarithms."

I do believe that we should have to - make the voters first; not the donors first.

Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

You're competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome.