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.

I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

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.

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

The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.

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.

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.