If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

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.

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

Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.

You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was.

I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.

At the moment of truth, there are either reasons or results.