Victor Hugo Quotes

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.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

The aeroplane is an invention of the devil and will never play any part in such a serious business as the defence of the nation, my boy!

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

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

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Look how far the human race has come in terms of air and space travel in the last hundred years. So in the next couple of thousand years, you've got to believe that we're going to be able to do all kinds of amazing things.

The future is in the skies.

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.

My career has been spent developing airplanes.

It still amazes me, when I go out and fly the T-38, and I'm looking at those little, short, skinny little wings, and that thing's flying. It's just amazing to me, even now.

I had no need of sails to drive me, nor oars nor wheels to push me, nor rails to give me a faster road. Air is what I wanted, that was all. Air surrounds me as water surrounds the submarine boat, and in it my propellers act like the screws of a steamer. That is how I solved the problem of aviation. That is what a balloon will never do, nor will any machine that is lighter than air.

I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.

Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples.

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

I've always thought flight was fun and wanted to write about flight, and I knew a lot of househusbands who were having a really bad time with it. I thought flight might perk up a marriage here or there.

In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.

By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Boeing jetliner will take off or land somewhere in the world.

The air travel industry moves into a new phase every five to six years.

My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.

Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.

From a cell to a jet call it Con-Air

For the first time I was flying by jet propulsion. No engine vibrations. No torque and no lashing sound of the propeller. Accompanied by a whistling sound, my jet shot through the air. Later when asked what it felt like, I said, "It felt as though angels were pushing".

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.