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Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.
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I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.
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It's really difficult for fanatic churchgoers to understand God can't help me. I'm the only one who can help me.
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It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.
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Never wait for trouble.
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If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.
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What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.
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If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.
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You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.
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Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.
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There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.
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In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.
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You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.
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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.