Nevil Shute quotes:

Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that.

If I have learned one thing in my 54 years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.

The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.

Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes - not yet, anyhow.

To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.

If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.

After two wars, I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed, and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life.

It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.

Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this.

Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it... Lovely.

Without work men are utterly undone

You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.

Everybody pays lip service to the safety of the aeroplane, but nobody is prepared to pay for it.

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.

Here they go cruising for a fortnight up in parts where everyone is dead of radiation, and all that they can catch is measles!

I never was in such a horrid office . . . It's not very nice to be where people are being swindled all day long, is it?

I'm glad we haven't got newspapers now. It's been much nicer without them.

It has been said that an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound; if that be so, we were certainly engineers.

It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.

Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.

She looked at him in wonder. "Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done." "That's as it may be," he replied. "The fact is, that you did it.

Some games are fun even when you lose. Even when you know you're going to lose before you start. It's fun just playing them.

The thing most worth doing in this modern world [is to] create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work.

There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.

You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love.