Eddie Rickenbacker Quotes

I am not such an egotist as to believe that God has spared me because I am I. I believe there is work for me to do and that I am spared to do it, just as you are.

Never count on the crowd to take care of you.

The biggest lesson I've learned ... was that if you have all the fresh water you want to drink and all the food you want to eat, you ought never to complain about anything.

The sensation of dying is sweet, sensuous, placid.

In this business, you find the enemy, then go after and destroy him. Everything else is rubbish!

Let the moment come when nothing is left but life, and you will find that you do not hesitate over the fate of material possessions.

The excitement of automobile racing did not compare with what I knew must come with aeroplane fighting in France.

I'll fight like a wildcat until they nail the lid of my pine box down on me.

I am not a labor hater.

When I was racing, I had learned that you can't set stock in public adoration or your press clippings. By the time I was 26, I'd heard crowds of 100,000 scream my name, but a week later they couldn't remember who I was. You're a hero today and a bum tomorrow - hero to zero, I sometimes say.

Most of one's troubles in this world come from something inside one's self.

The better I shoot, the less I have to maneuver.

If a thing is old, it is a sign that it was fit to live. Old families, old customs, old styles survive because they are fit to survive. The guarantee of continuity is quality. Submerge the good in a flood of the new, and good will come back to join the good which the new brings with it. Old-fashioned hospitality, old-fashioned politeness, old-fashioned honor in business had qualities of survival. These will come back.

I've cheated the Grim Reaper more times than anyone I know.

Think positively and masterfully, with confidence and faith, and life become more secure, more fraught with action, richer in experience and achievement.

Sports of every sort had always appealed to me.

I don't care what you cover the seats with as long as you cover them with assholes.

The obviously inexperienced pilot is the game the scientific air-fighter goes after, and the majority of victories are won that way. But, on the other hand, it is the novice usually who gets the famous ace by doing at some moment the unexpected thing.

Courage is about doing what you're afraid to do.

I shall never ask any pilot to go on a mission that I won't go on.

Fighting in the air is not a sport. It is scientific murder.

Long practise in driving a racing car at a hundred miles an hour or so gives first-class training in control and judging distances at high speed and helps tremendously in getting motor sense, which is rather the feel of your engine than the sound of it, a thing you get through your bones and nerves rather than simply your ears.

I would rather have a million friends than a million dollars.