A good businessman never makes a contract unless he's sure he can carry it through, yet every fool on earth is perfectly willing to sign a marriage contract without considering whether he can live up to it or not.

I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio

I feel like my sixteenth birthday and the time I graduated from high school, and the first time I flew solo all wrapped up in one.

Now listen, buddy, there are a few corny ideas you got to get out of your head if you're going to fly an airplane. Most things are just the reverse from what people think. The higher you are the safer you are. The Earth down there, that, that-s your enemy because once you hit that, boy, you splatter.

Have you ever been up in your plane at night, alone, somewhere, 20,000 feet above the ocean?... Did you ever hear music up there?... It's the music a man's spirit sings to his heart, when the earth's far away and there isn't any more fear. It's the high, fine, beautiful sound of an earth-bound creature who grew wings and flew up high and looked straight into the face of the future. And caught, just for an instant, the unbelievable vision of a free man in a free world.

There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.

One of the disadvantages of being a patrician is that occasionally you're obliged to act like one