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There are 5 quotes matching Mark Twain in the collection:
Arguing with a pilot is like wrestling with a pig in the mud, after a while you begin to think the pig likes it.
anon
Seen on a General Dynamics bulletin board. It was Mark Twain who said “Never try and teach a pig to sing. It’s a waste of your time, and it annoys the pig.”
In this age of inventive wonders all men have come to believe that in some genius’ brain sleeps the solution of the grand problem of aerial navigation — and along with that belief is the hope that that genius will reveal his miracle before they die, and likewise a dread that he will poke off somewhere and die himself before he finds out that he has such a wonder lying dormant in his brain. We all know the air can be navigated — therefore, hurry up your sails and bladders —satisfy us — us let us have peace.
Mark Twain
Letter to the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, 1 August 1869.
A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must start with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot.
Mark Twain
Writting about Mississippi river boat pilots, Old Times on the Mississippi, The Atlantic Monthly, published January to July, 1875.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be? — it is the same the angels breathe.
Mark Twain
Roughing It, Chapter XXII, 1886.
The origin of the quote really has nothing to do with flying. Twain was talking about the cool, foggy air at his campsite at Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada. But I like it, and used it as the title of my second book of quotes.
Mark Twain said, “Courage is the mastery of fear, resistance to fear, not the absence of fear.” At times the nearness of death brings an inexplicable exhilaration which starts the adrenaline flowing and results in instant action. The plane becomes an integral part of the pilot’s body, it is strapped to his butt, and they become a single fighting machine.
Robert M. Littlefield
Double Nickel — Double Trouble, 1993.
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