Lew Moran Quotes in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

Frank Towns: I've lost five men, Lew. Gabriel in there, he's on the way, that'll be six. Are you asking me to try to kill the rest of them trying to get a deathtrap off the ground. I don't know... I don't know, Lew. It won't work... it just can't work.

Lew Moran: All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.

Lew Moran: You told Towns he was behaving as if stupidity was a virtue. If he's making it into a virtue, YOU'RE MAKING IT INTO A BLOODY SCIENCE!

Lew Moran: I don't know what your practical navigation's like, but mine's not bad. I wouldn't march ten paces from here. In the daytime it's hitting a hundred and twenty in the shade, and out there, there is no shade.

Lew Moran: If you marched a hundred and six miles by the stars and your calculations were just one per cent out, you could pass the Eiffel Tower in daylight and never even see it.

Lew Moran: It may not be the best possible advertisement. but Frank Towns is probably one of the few really great pilots left in this push-button world of yours.

Heinrich Dorfmann: Oh, really?

Lew Moran: [angrily] Yes, 'Oh, really!' He was flying by the seat of his pants in planes that were nothing more than bits and pieces before you even went to school!

Heinrich Dorfmann: That's precisely what is wrong - he has remembered everything and learned nothing!

Lew Moran: Time was you could take real pride, in just getting there, flying used to be fun Lou, it really was.

Frank Towns: He's crazy Lou, he builds toy airplanes.

Lew Moran: [of an alternate destination] Three stinkin' mud huts and a poisoned well. That's not a place, it's a disease.

Lew Moran: Maybe Frank Towns, who's flown every crate they've ever built and could fly in and out of a tennis court if he had to, maybe that great hell-for-leather trailblazer's nothing more than a back number now. And maybe men like Dorfmann can build machines that can do Frank Towns's job for him, and do it better