Eddie Rickenbacker Quotes

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage 
unless you're scared.

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

Aviation is proof that given the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible."(1890-1973), American aviator

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

After a trip to Japan Mitchell famously predicted that the next war would be fought in the Pacific after a Japanese sneak attack on a Sunday morning in Hawaii. Eddie Rickenbacker, who had served as Mitchell’s driver before becoming an ace combat pilot, wryly quipped that “the only people who paid any attention to him were the Japanese.” Most

Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.

By 1929 a handful of farsighted flight pioneers had concluded that “aviation could not progress until planes could fly safely day or night in almost any kind of weather.” Foremost among these was Dr. Jimmy Doolittle, recently armed with a PhD in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In

They had graduated from cloth-and-wood flying machines in the dawn of human flight to steel and aluminum behemoths with thousands of horsepower and terrific firepower;

Most of one's troubles in this world come from something inside one's self.

Every disappointment that came to me brought with it an enduring lesson that repaid me eventually tenfold.

Lindbergh knew perfectly well what modern bombs could do to cities but, seeing Nazi Germany for the first time, the idea of a new and very dangerous war became real to him.

Germany,” Lindbergh said, “had the ambitious drive of America, but that drive was headed for war.

by the end of the war American warplanes were dropping seventeen hundred tons of bombs a day on Japanese cities.

But as Lindbergh’s friend former president Herbert Hoover instructed, “When you had been in politics long enough, you learned not to say things just because they are true.”21

a twenty-knot streak looked like; if there weren’t

During one raid alone in 1945, using conventional bombs, it was estimated that eighty-eight thousand Japanese were killed and six square miles of Tokyo were completely destroyed. But

After seventeen days of flying school he could now call himself a pilot. After putting in twenty-five hours of flying time, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army. W

With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at the altar of science, a fallacy, if not a heresy, that could lead to the undoing of the American spirit.

Lindbergh expressed these thoughts in a splendid speech while accepting the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy at the Washington Aero Club in January 1946. Titling his speech “Honoring the Wright Brothers,” he took as his theme “the way in which science was divorcing man from his old sense of independence and moral values.”16

In late 1915 there appeared on the Western Front a German flier named Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, after his royal title and a penchant for painting his squadron’s Fokker triwing fighters red. He was a natural born killer who shot down more than eighty enemy aircraft before himself being fatally brought down by ground fire

Not that the title of top American ace wasn’t flattering. After all, Rickenbacker had shot down seven enemy planes in as many months. It was just that all of the former recipients of the honor had all been killed, and he could not help but ruminate over what he called “the unavoidable doom that had overtaken its previous holders.” Rickenbacker

Though I live a thousand years,” recalled Pershing’s chief of staff, “I shall never forget that crowded hour.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date. World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker said it all when he remarked, "I can give you a six-word formula for success: Thnk things through-then follow through.

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

During World War II, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and his crew ran out of fuel and ditched their B-17 in the Pacific Ocean. For weeks nothing was heard of him, and across the country thousands of people prayed Then he returned and in an article told what had happened. “And this part I would hesitate to tell,” he wrote, “except that there were six witnesses who saw it with me. A gull came out of nowhere, and lighted on my head—I reached up my hand very gently—I killed him and then we divided him equally among us. We ate every bit, even the little bones. Nothing ever tasted so good.” This gull saved them from starvation. Years later I asked him to tell me the story personally, because it was through this experience that he came to know Christ. He said, “I have no explanation except that God sent one of His angels to rescue us.” We may never see them, but God still sends His angels to surround and protect His children—including you.

Rickenbacker, however, blued the air with a flood of horrible profanity that became “the masterpiece of his career,” according to one of the castaways.