You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.

I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.

That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it.

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.

All that I am ... I owe to the Air Force.