Eddie Rickenbacker Quotes
American - Aviator October 8, 1890 - July 27, 1973

Aviation is proof that given, the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.
Eddie Rickenbacker

When I look up and see the sun shining on the patch of white clouds up in the blue, I begin to think how it would feel to be up somewhere above it winging swiftly thought the clear air, watching the earth below, and the men on it, no bigger than ants.
Eddie Rickenbacker

The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence.
Eddie Rickenbacker

I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through - then follow through.
Eddie Rickenbacker

The obviously inexperienced pilot is the game the scientific air-fighter goes after, and the majority of victories are won that way. But, on the other hand, it is the novice usually who gets the famous ace by doing at some moment the unexpected thing.
Eddie Rickenbacker

There is a peculiar gratification in receiving congratulations from one's squadron for a victory in the air. It is worth more to a pilot than the applause of the whole outside world.
Eddie Rickenbacker

I would rather have a million friends than a million dollars.
Eddie Rickenbacker

Fighting in the air is not a sport. It is scientific murder.
Eddie Rickenbacker

I'll fight like a wildcat until they nail the lid of my pine box down on me.
Eddie Rickenbacker

It is the easiest thing in the world to die. The hardest is to live.
Eddie Rickenbacker

The sensation of dying is sweet, sensuous, placid.
Eddie Rickenbacker

Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared.
Eddie Rickenbacker

Never count on the crowd to take care of you.
Eddie Rickenbacker

I've cheated the Grim Reaper more times than anyone I know.
Eddie Rickenbacker

The experienced fighting pilot does not take unnecessary risks. His business is to shoot down enemy planes, not to get shot down.
Eddie Rickenbacker

Flying is one of the safest jobs in the Army as long as you don't drop out. If you do drop out, you are a dead man, and dropping out means, usually, that you have made a mistake or let go of your grip.
Eddie Rickenbacker

Long practise in driving a racing car at a hundred miles an hour or so gives first-class training in control and judging distances at high speed and helps tremendously in getting motor sense, which is rather the feel of your engine than the sound of it, a thing you get through your bones and nerves rather than simply your ears.
Eddie Rickenbacker

I shall never ask any pilot to go on a mission that I won't go on.
Eddie Rickenbacker

When I was racing, I had learned that you can't set stock in public adoration or your press clippings. By the time I was 26, I'd heard crowds of 100,000 scream my name, but a week later they couldn't remember who I was. You're a hero today and a bum tomorrow - hero to zero, I sometimes say.
Eddie Rickenbacker

I am not a labor hater.
Eddie Rickenbacker

Some friends are better shots than are casual enemies.
Eddie Rickenbacker

Sports of every sort had always appealed to me.
Eddie Rickenbacker

The excitement of automobile racing did not compare with what I knew must come with aeroplane fighting in France.
Eddie Rickenbacker


John W. Gardner Quotes
American - Educator October 8, 1912 - February 16, 2002


Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John W. Gardner

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
John W. Gardner

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
John W. Gardner

True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
John W. Gardner

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.
John W. Gardner

Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
John W. Gardner

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
John W. Gardner

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
John W. Gardner

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.
John W. Gardner

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John W. Gardner

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.
John W. Gardner

Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.
John W. Gardner

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
John W. Gardner

If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college.
John W. Gardner

One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
John W. Gardner

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
John W. Gardner

History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John W. Gardner

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
John W. Gardner

The cynic says, 'One man can't do anything.' I say, 'Only one man can do anything.'
John W. Gardner

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
John W. Gardner

If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
John W. Gardner

It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.
John W. Gardner

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
John W. Gardner

America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.
John W. Gardner

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
John W. Gardner

Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find strength in eloquence, some in judgment, some in courage.
John W. Gardner

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner


Bill Vaughan Quotes
American - Journalist October 8, 1915 - February 25, 1977

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughan

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.
Bill Vaughan

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.
Bill Vaughan

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.
Bill Vaughan

Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income - which he then spends sending his son to college.
Bill Vaughan

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
Bill Vaughan

Muscles come and go; flab lasts.
Bill Vaughan

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
Bill Vaughan

In the game of life, it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.
Bill Vaughan

By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.
Bill Vaughan

The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears.
Bill Vaughan

The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.
Bill Vaughan

I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.
Bill Vaughan

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.
Bill Vaughan

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
Bill Vaughan

People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong.
Bill Vaughan

The Vice-Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does.
Bill Vaughan

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.
Bill Vaughan

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.
Bill Vaughan

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.
Bill Vaughan

Maybe the answer to Selective Service is to start everyone off in the army and draft them for civilian life as needed.
Bill Vaughan

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
Bill Vaughan

Now that women are jockeys, baseball umpires, atomic scientists, and business executives, maybe someday they can master parallel parking.
Bill Vaughan

To God, thy country, and thy friend be true.
Bill Vaughan

The wonderful world of home appliances now makes it possible to cook indoors with charcoal and outdoors with gas.
Bill Vaughan


Walter Lord Quotes
American - Author October 8, 1917 - May 19, 2002

It's a funny thing, but today the Titanic is probably much more - that is people are much more aware of it than they were in 1954, when I was doing my research.
Walter Lord

Brilliantly lit from stem to stern, she looked like a sagging birthday cake.
Walter Lord

Events alone rarely provide much guide to the future.
Walter Lord

You have to study the people and the ones that measure up are not always the ones you expect.
Walter Lord

I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.
Walter Lord

I look for something that is highly unusual, involving ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations.
Walter Lord

Someone once told me the one thread that runs through them all is a premium on personal courage - not intellectual courage, but just plain physical courage.
Walter Lord

It would be nice to say the rich people, the fancy people, all behaved like bastards and the poor slobs all came through like heroes. But as a matter of fact, sometimes the poor slobs behave like slobs and the great, noble, privileged characters come off very well, indeed.
Walter Lord

There were exceptions, a couple of families that just plain didn't want to even think about it, although forty years had passed but mostly the people were very interested in talking about it.
Walter Lord


Frank Herbert Quotes
American - Writer October 8, 1920 - February 11, 1986

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Frank Herbert

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
Frank Herbert

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Frank Herbert

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Frank Herbert

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.
Frank Herbert

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
Frank Herbert

The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.
Frank Herbert

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
Frank Herbert

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
Frank Herbert

The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.
Frank Herbert

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
Frank Herbert

Truth suffers from too much analysis.
Frank Herbert

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
Frank Herbert

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
Frank Herbert

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
Frank Herbert

Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.
Frank Herbert

He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
Frank Herbert

It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.
Frank Herbert

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
Frank Herbert

Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.
Frank Herbert

Something cannot emerge from nothing.
Frank Herbert

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.
Frank Herbert

To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.
Frank Herbert

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
Frank Herbert

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
Frank Herbert

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
Frank Herbert

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
Frank Herbert