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.

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.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.

I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over.

The gospel of the kingdom talks about perseverance.

The tattoo can only exist as part of the skin, as a drawing always is an incision in the material and therefore cannot be parted from it.

Alliance does not mean love, any more than war means hate

A bully is fighting out of a need to dominate. And is usually unwilling to take the consequences.

Those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths and the natures which enjoy most keenly are those which also suffer most sharply.

What we have to do is reinvent the idea of Europe.

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.