Air Force Quotes

I'm an Air Force officer first, a pilot second and then Nicole. The female part is last ... My job is to be the best right wingman that I can be. ~ Nicole Malachowski

A modern, autonomous, and thoroughly trained Air Force in being at all times will not alone be sufficient, but without it there can be no national security. ~ Henry H. Arnold

The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one's country ~ George S. Patton Jr.

During a trip to Iraq last fall, I visited our theater hospital at Balad Air Force Base and witnessed these skilled medical professionals in action and met the brave soldiers whose lives they saved. ~ Melissa Bean

It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected. ~ Kapil Sharma

I joined the air force. I took to it immediately when I arrived there. I did three years, eight months, and ten days in all, but it took me a year and a half to get disabused of my romantic notions about it. ~ Morgan Freeman

Desperate men are dangerous. And I do know that the United States is not ready to go to war against Japan. Our navy isn't ready and our air force isn't ready. ~ Ken Follett

I was born on Mather Air Force Base near Sacramento, but we moved around a lot. ~ Carrie Vaughn

Any beings advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances are at least a thousand years beyond our technical level. Spending gobs of time examining our missiles is equivalent to sending the Air Force back to the Middle Ages and insisting they examine the chain mail factories. ~ Seth Shostak

The enduring responsibility of the United States Air Force is to provide strategic deterrence for the Nation and fly, fight and win as an integral part of the Joint Team. Together with our brothers and sisters in arms, we underwrite the national strategy of defending the Homeland and assuring allies, while dissuading, deterring and defeating enemies. ~ Norton A. Schwartz

As far as the command centers are concerned in Raqqa and to a lesser degree Mosul, cut those off. Do the same kind of thing that we did with Sinjar , working with our embedded special forces with the Kurds, shut off the supply route, soften them up, then we go in with specials ops followed by our air force to take them over. Those are things that work. ~ Benjamin Carson

The Nazis' entrance upon the European stage did not, at first, alarm the British. After all, under the Versailles treaty,the size of the German army and navy was limited and the defeated country was forbidden to maintain air force. The wake-up bell began sounding only when, in March 1935, Hitler renounced the treaty and declared that his country would indeed rebuild its military. The following year, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, Britons were unsettled to learn that his army was already three times the legal size ad that his air force, or Luftwaffe, would surpass their own. ~ Madeleine K. Albright

I'm an Air force Brat and I've lived all over the world and this country and there were people in my community who were gay - nurses, hairdressers, designers - people who just had a different way about themselves. ~ Pam Grier

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining? ~ George C. Wallace

However, the ability to control attention is not simply a measure of intelligence; measures of efficiency in the control of attention predict performance of air traffic controllers and of Israeli Air Force pilots beyond the effects of intelligence. ~ Daniel Kahneman

This car is more fun than the entire French air force crashing into a firework factory. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

My mom and dad met at UCLA when he as a captain in the Air Force and she was in her junior year. ~ Tracy Austin

You can't carpet bomb ISIS if you don't have planes and bombs to attack them with. And if we continue those cuts that we're doing , not to mention additional cuts, we are going to be left with the oldest and the smallest Air Force this country has ever had, and that leaves us less safe. ~ Marco Rubio

As a child, I lived in Germany at the Ramstein air force base, where my dad sang at a nightclub in Kaiserslautern. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter, so when I was, like, ten or 11, I would go with them to the bar until two in the morning. ~ James Mercer

WE STOLE THE EAGLE FROM THE AIR FORCE, THE ANCHOR FROM THE NAVY AND THE ROPE FROM THE ARMY.
ON THE SEVENTH DAY WHILE GOD RESTED, WE OVERRAN HIS PERIMETER, STOLE THE GLOBE AND WE'VE BEEN RUNNING THE WHOLE SHOW EVER SINCE. ~ U.S. Marine Corps

I was brought up in the north of Scotland, and where I lived was so lowly populated, it was used as a low-flying area by the Air Force, so lots of exciting aircraft used to fly over my village. ~ David Mackay

Looking up, Missouri saw a formation of low-flying P-47's on the horizon, heading up the coast from Naples...Sergeant Missouri laughed aloud. "They're sending us the Air Force, Chico, and we made it with a donkey," he said. ~ Maureen Daly

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force. ~ William Blum

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days. ~ Evan Parker

Instead of giving the effort the level of attention needed, the Air Force has wasted a year doing very little to end our reliance on Russian rocket engines, if the Air Force is unwilling to do what is necessary to meet the 2019 deadline, they are going to have to figure out how to meet our space launch needs without the RD-180 (Russian engine). ~ John McCain

Our losses ... have reached an intolerable level. The enemy air force played a decisive role in inflicting these high losses. ~ Karl Donitz

I'd put the ninety-nine billion dollars - whatever it is - that's being appropriated for the Air Force and the Navy, and I'd put it into schools. I'd put it into traveling scholarships. ~ Nelson Algren

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army and calls it a war. ~ Noam Chomsky

Before statehood was achieved, Syria and Egypt had their tanks and military equipment lined up to invade Tel Aviv and destroy it; but the Israelis scrambled together an air force, some of it from old Second World War Messerschmidts, and the invasion was halted. ~ Steven Spielberg

In order to assure an adequate national defense, it is necessary - and sufficient - to be in a position in case of war to conquer the command of the air. ~ Giulio Douhet

Phi cang Saigon Tansonnhut"

"He puzzled at the meaning and smiled inwardly. The sign probably said, "Welcome and Affectionate Salutations to All Who Enter the Glorious Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Home of Seventh Air Force, Only Minutes from Beautiful Saigon." Or maybe not; he couldn't know. Maybe it read, "Welcome to the Dung Heap of Despair - Abandon Cheer, All Ye Who Enter. ~ Tony Taylor

I was in bed at my beach house, but could not sleep because of some fried chicken in the icebox that I felt entitled to. I waited till my wife dropped off, and tiptoed into the kitchen. I remembered looking at the clock. It was precisely four-fifteen. I'm quite certain of this, because our kitchen clock has not worked in twenty-one years and is always at that time. I also noticed that our dog, Judas, was acting funny. He was sanding up on his hind legs and singing, 'I Enjoy Being a Girl.' Suddenly the room turned bright orange. At first, I thought my wife had caught me eating between meals and set fire to the house. Then I looked out the window, where to my amazement I saw a gigantic cigar-shaped aircraft hovering just over the treetops in the yard and emitting an orange glow. I stood transfixed for what must have been several hours, though our clock still read four-fifteen, so it was difficult to tell. Finally, a large, mechanical claw extended from the aircraft and snatched the two pieces of chicken from my hand and quickly retreated. When I reported the incident to the Air Force, they told me that what I had seen was a flock of birds. When I protested, Colonel Quincy Bascomb personally promised that the Air Force would return the two pieces of chicken. To this day, I have only received one piece. ~ Woody Allen

We must not take everything on our own shoulders; if we did, our successors would have nothing to do but to sleep. We must leave them some problems to solve, and the means with which to solve them - namely, a mighty Army and a mighty Air Force ; and the Army must be taught that, if some cowardly crew of politicians should come to power, then it is the Army's duty to intervene - as the Army in Japan did.
As a general principle, I think that a peace which lasts for more than twenty-five years is harmful to a nation. Peoples, like individuals, sometimes need regenerating by a little bloodletting. Our ancestors fought duels. Next came the barber and his bleeding-cups - and now we have the safety razor !
Nobody in the Middle Ages suffered from high blood-pressure - their constant brawls were ample safeguard against it; and in Upper Bavaria they practised the custom of Sunday bloodletting. Now, thanks to the safety razor, the world's bloodpressure is rising. It fills me with shame when I think that I have lost more blood shaving than on the field of battle. ~ Adolf Hitler

NASA documents from 1966 confirm the United States weather modification programme with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and in the 1990s the US military was publishing papers expounding the war possibilities of weather manipulation, or 'geoengineering' as it is also known. American scientist J. Marvin Herndon described in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015 how weather modification has been happening for decades and includes the 'make mud, not war' programme named Project Popeye to create monsoon-scale rain during the Vietnam War. US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report published in 1996 explained how artificially-generated floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes 'offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary'. ~ David Icke

I made a date with her for the following week. Mid-week, I went for a ride in a T-28. The engine failed, the pilot slid the plane into the sand of the Mojave out near El Centro, and I slid into a hospital bed for about ten days at North Island Naval Air Station. While I was in the hospital, the CARDIV left for WestPac. I called Marguerite and told her what happened and that I wanted to see her again. I'm not sure she believed me, but agreed to another date. Unfortunately it had to be a short date because I had to head for Norton Air Force base to catch a flight for Hawaii, to meet up with the CARDIV. ~ W.R. Spicer

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members."

A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experimen ~ Carol Rutz

Mr Speaker, Mr Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans, last month I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought, and several thousand gave their lives. We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. ~ Barack Obama

At an early age, I quit high school at 17 and joined the Air Force. ~ Sandy Adams

EVERY PILOT REMEMBERS his first flight. For me, it was in a Cessna 172 at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1968. ~ George W. Bush

Eisenhower's speech contained an unsubtle dig at Rockefeller, in the guise of a dig at Kennedy: "Just as the Biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who ... continually mouth the allegations that America has become a second-rate military power." He was proceeded at the podium by his black special assistant E. Frederic Morrow, who had flown in with the President on Air Force One. "One hundred years ago my grandfather was a slave," radio and TV audiences heard. "Tonight I stand before you as a trusted assistant to the President of the United" - and then the networks cut away for fear of offending their Southern affiliates. ~ Rick Perlstein

The idea of mind separate from body goes far back in time. The most famous expression of this is the idea of the Platonic image discussed in the Socratic Dialogues (circa 350 BC). Socrates and Plato expressed the opinion that the real world was but a shadow of reality, and that reality existed on a higher, purer plane reachable only through and preserved in the mind. The mind was considered immortal and survived the crumbling corpus in which it dwelt. But only enlightened minds, such as theirs, could see true reality. As such, they believed people like themselves ought to be elevated to the position of philosopher kings and rule the world with purity of vision. (A similarly wacky idea was expressed by the fictional air force General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's classic dark satire Dr. Strangelove. General Ripper postulated that purity of essence was the most important thing in life.) ~ James Luce

I've led a life of such structured discipline and always had a goal in mind of knowing what I was doing, from West Point to the Air Force combat, MIT, looking for new things to study and get involved in. And then I got into the space program, and how disciplined can you get? ~ Buzz Aldrin

I heard this when I was in the Air Force: There's never enough time to do the job right, but always enough time to do it over. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Over the past eighteen years I have acted as a scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force on the subject of unidentified flying objects - UFO's. As a consequence of my work on the voluminous air force files and, to a greater extent, of personal investigation of many puzzling cases and interviews with witnesses of good repute, I have long been aware that the subject of UFO's could not be dismissed as mere nonsense. ~ J. Allen Hynek

There is a bright spot or two for the Spaniards. French toast has become freedom toast on the Air Force One breakfast menu, but the Spanish omelet is still a Spanish omelet. ~ Suzanne Fields

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. ~ Thomas Friedman

I was in the Air Force and was a boom operator (in-flight refueling). I got my comedy start in the Air Force. ~ Sinbad

After I finished my master's degree, I moved to a company called Aerospace Corporation, a big think tank for the U.S. Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office. ~ Gwynne Shotwell

My dad was in the military, yeah. He was in the Air Force, and he was a doctor, so he would go places for six months here, and two years there. And I was home-schooled because I played the violin, and I did a lot of competitions. ~ Felicia Day

It is true that I was denied access to a facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, because I never got in. I can't tell you what was inside. We both know about the rumors concerning a captured UFO and crew members. I have never seen what I would call a UFO, but I have intelligent friends who have. ~ Barry Goldwater

Since when is the intelligence agency supposed to be an air force of drones that goes around killing people? I believe that it's a job for the Department of Defense. ~ John McCain

some prominent aviation museums across India including the HAL Museum in Bangalore, the Indian Air Force Museum in Delhi and the Naval Aviation Museum in Goa which are storehouses of information ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets of our air force. ~ Martin Van Creveld

I'm still a reservist. We have three drilling reservists in the Senate. Senator Graham serves in the Air Force, Senator Brown serves in the Army, and I serve in the Navy. ~ Mark Kirk

Allied air forces flying from England lost twenty bombers a day in March; another three thousand Eighth Air Force bombers were damaged that month. Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The ~ Rick Atkinson

Bill Clinton sitting on Air Force One getting his hair cut while people around the country cooled their heels and waited for him, became a metaphor for a populist president who had gotten drunk with the perks of his own power and was sort of, you know, not sensitive to what people wanted. ~ Dee Dee Myers

I always wanted to go into the military or something like that - my whole family, all my friends are either Air Force, Navy, or Marines. ~ RJ Mitte

Law Number XVI: In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine

When I was at high school, I thought it'd be nice to go into Air Force Academy and fly jets, but that was a very brief dream. Ha, ha. I'm too lanky to fit in the cockpit. ~ Emily Robison

But the Air Force was sort of a bastard child of the Army, much like the Marines with the Navy. Everything had to be done over by the Army after it had already been done by the Air Corps, a mess. ~ Stuart Symington

We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set. ~ Aaron Sorkin

The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did - and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

We use the Air Force analogy: there were expensive things they had to do to get a cockpit suitable for a lot of pilots, like wraparound windshields, but their initial solutions, when they realized average didn't work, were adjustable seats. How in the world did they not already have adjustable seats in their planes? We're looking for adjustable seats for education, for basic things that we can do. ~ L. Todd Rose

Charlie Tilghman, who flies a restored B-24 for the Commemorative Air Force, taught me about flying the Liberator. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the Air Force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm. ~ Woody Norris

With control of the universe at stake, a crash program is imperative.We produced the A-bomb, under the huge Manhattan Project, in an amazingly short time. The needs, the urgency today are even greater. The Air Force should end UFO secrecy, give the facts to scientists,the public, to Congress. Once the people realize the truth, they would back, even demand a crash program ... for this is one race we dare not lose. ~ Donald Keyhoe

I flew on Air Force Two for eight years, and now I have to take off my shoes to get on an aeroplane. ~ Al Gore

There are several reasons to oppose tax increases. First, every dollar of tax increase is a dollar you didn't get in spending restraint. Two, if you walk into the Democrats' Andrews-Air-Force-Base, Lucy-with-the-Football trick for the third time in a row - they don't have have a saying for being fooled three times! ~ Grover Norquist

I am an Air Force brat who grew up at various Air Force bases. I changed six schools in about five years and got stability for the first time when I was sent to a boarding school, Rishi Valley. I lived outside of a cantonment-style living and was among an eclectic mix of kids and got exposed to books and other things. ~ Kapil Sharma

The Americans called theirs the Officers Club but the Canadians called ours the Officers Mess. The American term was the more honest; ours the more accurate. Drunken officers at play are messy. ~ R.J. Childerhose

Mellas knew that Hawke was letting him squirm. Then, without looking up, Hawke said, 'Look, Mellas, in the Navy or Air Force they give you a medal for what the Marines call just doing their job. In the Marines you only get a medal for being braver than just doing your job. Then he looked at Mellas. 'You get in fixes where medals are handed out because you were unlucky and had to fix things, or because you were stupid and had to fix things. Be carful what you're wishing for. ~ Karl Marlantes

The Air Force is pulling nine cargo aircraft from military operations to support President Obama's stepped-up visits to campaign events. Good, now he can carry his entire ego with him on the trail. ~ Fred Thompson

The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi Air Force between 1983 and 1988, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tonnes. ~ Hans Blix

I was taught to think outside the box. Before my grandfather was one of the original Mad Men, he and a group of other Air Force Intelligence officers formalized brainstorming as a problem solving technique. He taught the concept that creativity can be taught at Buffalo University. My dad invented toys. My mom was a photographer. ~ M.J. Rose

I grew up thinking that I would become a fighter pilot and was fascinated by aircrafts as I had grown up around that. But my father encouraged me to not become an Air Force person, given the varied interests I had, be it books, movies, sports or fighter flying. ~ Kapil Sharma

The children are designated as "Air Force aides of the Hitler youth" and wear military uniforms and become used to handling the anti-aircraft artillery flak guns. 15 and 16 year old children as warriors! If the war still continues to last for a long time, perhaps the babies will be also employed. Total war!! ~ Friedrich Kellner

In the Belgian air force a general supposedly saw a UFO, tracked it with his plane, photographed it with his wing cameras. And I believe it because I said to myself why would this person, not getting paid for this, do it unless it actually happened or he thought it happened. ~ Robert Stack

If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I had a great family. My father was in the Air Force, so we were always disciplined, goal oriented. ~ Thomas Jones

Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You must be a light unto yourself. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don't even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war. ~ Richard Engel

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.'

I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.

But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was ali ~ Jeanette Winterson

The city of Copenhagen is a climate crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport in shame. World leaders had a once in a generation chance to change the world for good, to avert catastrophic climate change. In the end they produced a poor deal full of loopholes big enough to fly Air Force One through. ~ Kumi Naidoo

If our airforces are never used, they have achieved their finest goal. ~ Nathan Farragut Twining

I love writing about the military, as I live near an air force base and am inspired by the sacrifices our soldiers make for us. I like to give them a lot of challenges to beat, and show how they live with intrigue and danger. ~ Franny Armstrong

Hardly had I left when we ran into the Korean war, doubled what I had asked for and doubled it again. I had told him I would stay in Government, be honored to, but not with the Air Force. ~ Stuart Symington

I think some highly secret government UFO investigations are going on that we don't know about
and probably never will unless the Air Force discloses them. ~ Barry Goldwater

The thing I miss about Air Force One is they don't lose my luggage. ~ George H. W. Bush

We have sacrificed and we have endured extreme hardship, but we have maintained the key goal - we have denied the enemy its main objective of creating two political geographies in this country through the all-out war which has been unleashed against us. If we had a first-rate air force, the nature of the conflict would be completely different. ~ Ashraf Ghani

I have found there are real objects under in intelligent control being seen on the ground and in our skies worldwire. The unknowns have varied over the decades from 22 percent in my own civilian files, 30 percent in the University of Colorda Condon Committee scientific studies, to at least 40 percent recently revised found in the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book military investigations. This is not acceptable, no matter who is doing the investigations. ~ George Fawcett

The people designing the weapons literally often didn't know how they were being handled in the field by the Air Force - and a lot of people in the Air Force didn't understand some of the dangers. There's a very strong element of madness in this. ~ Eric Schlosser

I went to a military school between the ages of six and 12 and later into the air force. You learn discipline and strength of character. ~ Larry Hagman

My grandpa used to be in the Royal Air Force when he was younger," Liam tells me. "He loved to fly. He had his own airplane. Still does. When I was twelve, he told me that he thought it was time that I learned how to fly a plane."

"You flew a plane when you were twelve?" I give him a shocked look.

"My grandpa's not exactly on the conventional side." The fondness on his face tells me that his grandpa means a great deal to him. "And when I say 'fly'" - he air quotes - "it was him flying and me being copilot. But twelve-year-old me thought that he meant literally fly the plane. So, I was shitting myself."

"I can imagine. I'd shit if someone said that to me now, and I'm twenty-two."

Liam laughs. "I think you'd probably surprise yourself."

"No, I'm pretty sure I'd surprise the person sitting with me - you know, after I shit myself. ~ Samantha Towle

My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years. I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up. ~ Philip Pullman

If you're from New York and you're Catholic, you're still Jewish. If you're from Butte Montana and you're Jewish, you're still goyisch. The Air Force is Jewish, the Marine Corps dangerous goyisch. Rye Bread is Jewish, instant potatoes, scary goyisch. Eddie Cantor is goyisch, George Jessel is goyisch-Coleman Hawkins is Jewish. ~ Lenny Bruce

My father served 26 years in the Air Force as a pilot and a pioneer in our missile programs. I learned early about the sacrifices a family makes when a member is repeatedly deployed, and also the fulfillment that comes from serving our country. My brother, my son and I all became Marines. ~ Jim Webb

Dad went to Canada to learn how to fly with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He took me on my first airplane ride, where I could have a hand on the stick. ~ Wally Schirra

I am an Air Force brat - that's the terminology they use for military kids who are traveling constantly. ~ Vanessa Minnillo

When Colonel Gadhafi started using his air force against civilians on the ground, we did not hesitate. Then we supported the resolution of the Security Council, which introduced arms embargo for Libya. ~ Sergei Lavrov