Wright Brothers (Orville & Wilbur)

We did not have a university education, but we had a good deal of common sense.

We were not looking for fame, but we were looking for knowledge.

The flying machine is a thing of the future, and it is a thing that will change the world.

We kept at it, and we kept on learning.

The machine was not perfect, but it was a beginning.

The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.

We had no idea of the amount of publicity that would follow our flights.

The problem of flight was not one of power, but of control.

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.

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.

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

It is not disputed that every person who is using this system today owes it to us and to us alone.

It is our view that morally the world owes its almost universal use of our system of lateral control entirely to us. It is also our opinion that legally it owes it to us.

I have not the time for both a wife and an airplane.

I never had any particular love for the airplane. What I love is to fly.

Often, after an hour or so of heated argument, we would discover that we were as far from agreement as when we started, but that each had changed to the other's original position.

The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years — provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. No doubt the problem has attractions for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.

When one comes to increase the size of the craft, the possibility rapidly fades away. This is because of the difficulties of carrying sufficient fuel. It will readily be seen, therefore, why the Atlantic flight is out of the question.

If its engine stops, it must fall with deathly violence, for it can neither glide like the aeroplane or float like the balloon. The helicopter is much easier to design than the aeroplane, but is worthless when done.

I believe that my course in sending our Kitty Hawk machine to a foreign museum is the only way of correcting the history of the flying machine, which by false and misleading statements has been perverted by the Smithsonian Institution.