Charles Lindbergh quotes

Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator, inventor, and author, best known for making the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. His daring transatlantic flight in 1927 made him an international hero. He later became involved in aviation innovation and various social and scientific causes. Here are 45 of his quotes:

I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes. (Charles Lindbergh)
Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Real freedom lies in wildness, not civilization. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand? View quote
Charles Lindbergh
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
I owned the world that hour as I rode over it... free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquest... View quote
Charles Lindbergh
After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars. (Charles Lindbergh)
I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place? View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races. We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life - a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
What kind of man would live where there is no danger? I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished by not taking a chance at all. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
The forces of Hannibal, Drake and Napoleon moved at best with the horses' gallop or the speed of wind on sail. Now, aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men. It demands adaptability to change, places a premium on quickness of thought and speed of action. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
It is the greatest shot of adrenaline to be doing what you have wanted to do so badly. You almost feel like you could fly without the plane. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? View quote
Charles Lindbergh
The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? (Charles Lindbergh)
Air power is new to all our countries. It brings advantages to some and weakens others; it calls for readjustment everywhere. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation? View quote
Charles Lindbergh
It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men - where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time. View quote
Charles Lindbergh
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. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe - one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown. View quote
Charles Lindbergh