Chuck Yeager quotes:

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.

It's really difficult for fanatic churchgoers to understand God can't help me. I'm the only one who can help me.

Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At 42,000' in approximately level flight, a third cylinder was turned on. Acceleration was rapid and speed increased to .98 Mach. The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale. Assuming that the off-scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach was attained at this time.

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

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.

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.

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

Leveling off at 42,000 feet, I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached .96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride. Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach - then tipped right off the scale ... We were flying supersonic. And it was a smooth as a baby's bottom; Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.

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 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.

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

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

You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of serious situations. And that's the way the X-1 was.

There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.

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.

The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.

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.

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

The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.

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.

It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.

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.

Never wait for trouble.

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

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

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.

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it...