Chuck Yeager Quotes

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.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

At the moment of truth, there are either reasons or results.

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.

After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.

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

You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was.

Never wait for trouble.

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.

I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.

Hey Ridley, that Machometer is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me.

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.

I have no regrets about my life. People ask, "If you had to do it all over again, would you do it differently?" No. That's speculation.