Shocking Sayings

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 e…

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.

In its campaign to discredit others in the flying art, the Smithsonian has issued scores of these false and misleading statements.

Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I cannot soon give a solution to these question…

Knowing how contented, free and joyful is life in the realms of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter their portals.

It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as…

Without order, our science is nothing but a miserable collection of facts.

The periodic table is a work of art, a testament to the elegance and order of the natural world.

I don't believe a word of the whole thing they must have spent the whole of their £500. million in separating isotopes. and then it's possible.

One can't say that one could equally well say that's the quickest way of ending the war.

We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up.

You spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that under your leadership everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons.

I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine. but I never thought that we would make a bomb. and at the bottom of my heart. I was really glad that it was to be an engine.

Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?