The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can't win a war if you haven't.

Nothing is as strong as the heart of a volunteer.

If we should have to fight, we should be prepared to do so from the neck up instead of from the neck down.

Just try to make the world a better place for your having been here.

To become an ace a fighter must have extraordinary eyesight, strength, and agility, a huntsman's eye, coolness in a pinch, calculated recklessness, a full measure of courage and occasional luck!

I have been luckier than the law of averages should allow. I could never be so lucky again.

Germany may have recovered a flying saucer as early as 1939

The country will some day pay for the stupidities of those who were in the majority on this commission. They know as much about the future of aviation as they do about the sign writing of the Aztecs.

I could never be so lucky again

The function and Navy in any future war will be to support the dominant air arm.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

A star never loses its shine, not even in the dark.

The fruit of timidity is neither gain nor loss.

Binary thinking is human nature: Light/Dark, Beautiful/Ugly, Full/Empty, Male/Female.But NONE of those are binary—they’re all gradients.

I'd like to say I was smart enough to finish six grades in five years, but I think perhaps the teacher was just glad to get rid of me.

I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

It never gets easier, you just go faster. To put it another way, training is like fighting with a gorilla. You don’t stop when you’re tired. You stop when the gorilla is tired.

People comment, and that's where we are now. It's the way the world is.

I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.