GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Carl Sagan

This king flies away from you, you mortals. He is not of the earth, he is of the sky. He flies as a cloud to the sky, he who was like a bird at the masthead. He goes up to heaven like the hawks, and his feathers are like those of the wild geese; he rushes at heaven like a crane, he kisses heaven like the falcon, he leaps to heaven like the locust. He ascends to the sky! He ascends to the sky on the wind, on the wind! The stairs of the sky are let down for him that he may ascend thereon to heaven. O gods, put your arms under the king: raise him, lift him to the sky. To the sky! To the sky! To the great throne amongst the gods!

Inscription in pyramid of pharaoh Unnos, circa 2345 BC. Oldest aviation quote? This translation from 1925 book A History of the Pharaohs: Volume I The First Eleven Dynasties.. These pyramid texts are the earliest known corpus of ancient Egyptian religious writings.

This version was probably the source of the epigraph for Chapter 21, To The Sky! in Carl Sagan's 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science , 1979.

For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the Moon. It reads: 'We came in peace for all mankind.' As the United States was dropping 7.5 megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity: We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.

Carl Sagan

Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994.