Chuck Yeager Quotes

To jump and break the sound barrier will not be a mere record breaking experience or another extreme event that ends once the mission is accomplished.

I was lucky enough to fly in Concorde, and you get up to 65,000 feet, and I could see the curvature of the Earth.

Leveling off at 42,000 feet, I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached .96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride. Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach - then tipped right off the scale ... We were flying supersonic. And it was a smooth as a baby's bottom; Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

I had to tell somebody, anybody, that we’d busted straight through the sound barrier. But the transmissions were restricted. ‘Hey Ridley!’ I called. ‘Make another note. There’s something wrong with this Machmeter. It’s gone completely screwy!’

I used to be the third person in the secret jets we had - they were secret at the time - a jet bomber that flew at immense heights carrying atomic bombs.

All at once the cockpit lit up with a sort of white glow because your entry was at 25,000 miles an hour and it was ionising some of the first particles of air you had. So it was kinda a little bit like being inside a weak neon bulb.

Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

That spin became so violent, it was hard to know how to get out of it. I was able to get it under control and break the speed of sound...I could feel myself break the speed of sound. I could feel the air building up and then I hit it.

Supersonic airplanes have carried men at more than 2,000 miles per hour and there are reasons to believe that this speed will be doubled by 1960 or so.

I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.

I think that most people go to bookshops and have no idea what they want to buy. Somehow the books sit there, almost magically willing people to pick them up. The right person for the right book. Its as though they know whose life they need to be a part of, how they can make a difference, how they can teach a lesson, put a smile on a face at just the right time.

My modus operandi hasn't really changed that much from when I was an English teacher. I wanted my students to leave my classroom loving reading and wanting to read more, and if they left my classroom thinking that reading is boring, then I haven't done my job.

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

A book is valuable not only for what it says but for what it makes you think, or causes you to remember. No matter what you wish to do or become there are books to teach you, help you, guide you.

Awareness of having better things to do with their lives is the secret to immunizing our children against false values--whether presented on television or in "real life." The child who finds fulfillment in music or reading or cooking or swimming or writing or drawing is not as easily convinced that he needs recognition or power or some "high" to feel worthwhile.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

I view askance a book that remains undisturbed for a year. Oughtn't it to have a ticket of leave? I think I may safely say no bookin my library remains unopened a year at a time, except my own works and Tennyson's.

Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.

One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.

I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man's destruction of forests. . . . Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.