GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Wilbur Wright

There are 27 quotes matching Wilbur Wright in the collection:

I know of only one bird — the parrot — that talks; and it can’t fly very high.

Wilbur Wright

When asked to speak at a dinner given in his honor at the Aero Club de la Sarthe, 24 September 1908. He declined, saying only this one sentence. He had expressed similar thoughts about self-promotion to the Wright’s financial agent Charles Flint several times:

“Wilbur said to me, Mr. Flint, the best talker and the worst flier among the birds is the parrot.” (Quoted in The Sport of Fying, The Outing Magazine, May 1909.)

The moment Wilbur stood up in Paris to give his now famous ‘parrot speech’ was captured in a photograph:

If only some of our people in England could see or imagine what Mr. Wright is now doing I am certain it would give them a terrible shock. A conquest of the air by any nation means more than the average man is willing to admit or even think about. That Wilbur Wright is in possession of a power which controls the fate of nations is beyond dispute.

Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell

President of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, following the Wright Brothers public flying demonstrations in Le Mans, France, 1908. He was brother of Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts. Quoted in the Paris edition of the New York Herald, 6 October 1908.

I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.

Wilbur Wright

Letter to the Aéro-Club de France, 5 November 1908.

I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since refrained from all prediction.

Wilbur Wright

Speech accepting the Gold Medal from the Aéro Club de France in Paris, 5 November 1908.

It is not really necessary to look too far into the future [of aviation]; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.

Wilbur Wright

Speech accepting the Gold Medal from the Aero Club of France in Paris, 5 November 1908.

No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.

Wilbur Wright

Interview in the Cairo, Illinois Bulletin, 25 March 1909. This is often mis-quoted to say no ‘flying machine’ will make the journey. But the quote is about airships, blimps or Zeppelins, not the much faster airplane.

I know him well and he is just the kind of man to accomplish such an undertaking. He is apparently without fear and what he sets out to do he generally accomplishes. This recklessness makes him anything but a good aviator, however, for he lacks entirely the element of caution.

Wilbur Wright

Cited as 'American Aeronat', on receiving the news that Louis Blériot had crossed the English Channel, the first to do so in an aeroplane. Quoted in Lays Aside Crutches to Fly Across Channel, Automobile Topics Illustrated, 31 July 1909.

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