The essence of life, I concluded, did not lie in the material. It penetrated, but was not bound to, the physical world of science.

I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.

Democracy can only spring from within a nation itself, only from the hearts and minds of its people.

I hope you either take up parachute jumping or stay out of single motored airplanes at night.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow.

Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.