Otto Lilienthal Quotes

It seems to me that the conquest of the air is the only major task for our generation.

I believe the new machine of the Wrights to be the most promising attempt at flight that has yet been made.

The people of Sydney who can speak of my work [on flying-machine models] without a smile are very scarce; it is doubtless the same with American workers. I know that success is dead sure to come, and therefore do not waste time and words in trying to convince unbelievers.

I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.

What of the Wright boys in Dayton? Just around the corner they had a shop and did a bicycle business-and they wanted to fly for the sake of flying. They were Man the Seeker, Man on a Quest. Money was their last thought, their final absent-minded idea. They threw out a lot of old mistaken measurements and figured new ones that stood up when they took off and held the air and steered a course. They proved that "the faster you go the less power you need."

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

Flight without feathers is not easy.

Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which men will never have to cope.

If we did not have such a thing as an airplane today, we would probably create something the size of N.A.S.A. to make one.

If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers.

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.

Men will sometimes fly, but it will not be in our lifetime.

I am well convinced that Aerial Navigation will form a most prominent feature in the progress of civilization

More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones, more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from the earth and opened the skies.

Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is, of course, air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainment. In the brief span of thirty-odd years, the world has seen an inventor's dream first materialized by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk become an everyday actuality.

Can you imagine being Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1400s trying to describe his ideas for machines that would allow humans to fly to the average person of his time? This is hundreds of years before the invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and many other things we take for granted today.

It is difficult to fly without wings.

Artificial flight may be defined as that form of aviation in which a man flies at will in any direction by means of an apparatus attached to his body, the use of which requires personal skill. Artificial flight by a single individual is the proper beginning for all species of artificial flight, as the necessary conditions can most easily be fulfilled when man flies individually.

The helicopter appeared so reluctant to fly forward that we even considered turning the pilot's seat around and letting it fly backward.

Ours is the commencement of a flying age, and I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting.

I showed it is possible to fly a little bit like a bird.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings. Coming down is the hardest thing.