Southwest Airlines Quotes

The spirit of Southwest Airlines is exuberant, it's caring, it's dedicated, it's diligent, it's fun, it's rewarding, it's a joy. ~ Herb Kelleher

I flew out here on Southwest Airlines. Southwest has a plane that's painted like Shamu the whale from Sea World. Yeah, that'll be easy to find if that went down in the ocean. That'll be nice, when you're trying to get out and a real whale's humping your window. ~ Robert Schimmel

Southwest Airlines is successful because the company understands it's a customer service company. It also happens to be an airline. ~ Harvey MacKay

There are many people talking about access to space and, 'How can we make that cheaper? How can we turn that into a Southwest Airlines versus the big airlines?' ~ Buzz Aldrin

A woman on a Southwest Airlines flight gave birth to a baby. As soon as he was born, the baby said, 'I had more leg room in the womb.' ~ Conan O'Brien

Some of the greatest businesses operating from a deeper purpose have a real commitment to service, like Four Seasons, Joie de Vivre hotels, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue. ~ John Mackey

I guess the worst moment I ever had in business was the fear that Southwest Airlines wouldn't get off the ground. ~ Herb Kelleher

Keep costs low and spirits high, and the people of Southwest Airlines will keep LUV in the air. ~ Herb Kelleher

When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew. ~ Herb Kelleher

What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation. ~ Peter Diamandis

The scenic vistas of North Carolina and Tennessee make you feel like you're looking at a work of art, but crossing through the rural countryside of southwest Virginia and caressing the tall grass with your fingertips, you feel like you're part of the painting. ~ Jennifer Pharr Davis

The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation. ~ Ryan Hackney

Take Obama's challenge, in January 2010, to the assembled CEOs at the Forum on Modernizing Government: "If you can book dinner on OpenTable, or a flight on Southwest or United online, then why shouldn't you be able to make an appointment at your local Social Security office the same way? ~ Aneesh Chopra

The saying "Getting there is half the fun" became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines. ~ Henry Tillman

Here in the news media, our focus is on speed. When we get hold of some new and possibly inaccurate information, our highest priority is to get it to you, the public, before our competitors do. If the news media owned airlines, there would be a lot less concern about how many planes crashed, and a lot more concern about whose plane hit the ground first. ~ Dave Barry

There is no economy without airlines. Airfreight runs the world. There is no Honolulu without an airplane. This is a very complex system. If you take it down, you can't build it back up overnight. ~ Gordon Bethune

The Airlines lady who travels in the same compartment as us day after day, has bruises on her arms and face today and her eyes keep welling, but no one asks her why. Our eyes dart towards her, but we go back to travelling in too much proximity. Two inches from one another and expressionless. ~ Amruta Patil

I grew up in Georgia, in a small town in the southwest corner of Georgia, actually, called Sylvester. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

United Airlines: Passengers are our worst enemy. We're not too fond of luggage either. ~ David Letterman

The United States lost the nuclear-powered submarine Thresher 100 miles east of Cape Cod in 1963, and the submarine Scorpion sank in 1968 in more than 10,000 feet of water 400 miles southwest of the Azores. ~ Andrew Rosenthal

Whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there's Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?A business genius he [Donald Trump] is not. ~ Mitt Romney

I'd had no particular interest in the Southwest at all as a young girl, and I was completely surprised that the desert stole my heart to the extent it did. ~ Terri Windling

I retired at twenty-nine, bought a life-time pass on American Airlines and my only goal in life was to party like a mad man and get drunk with as many people as possible. And I was happy right there. But when we started the streaming business, I knew it could be something big. ~ Mark Cuban

Young Tom Joad and the preacher watched the turtle go - waving its legs and boosting its heavy, highdomed shell along toward the southwest. The cat crept along behind for a while, but in a dozen yards it arched its back to a strong taut bow and yawned, and came stealthily back toward the seated men.
"Where the hell you s'pose he's goin'?" said Joad. "I seen turtles all my life. They're always goin' someplace. They always seem to want to get there."
The gray cat seated itself between and behind them again. It blinked slowly. The skin over its shoulders jerked forward under a flea, and then slipped slowly
back. The cat lifted a paw and inspected it, flicked its claws out and in again experimentally, and licked its pads with a shell-pink tongue ~ John Steinbeck

According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I've been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meal. Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner toll you could kill a musk ox with. ~ Dave Barry

But the southwest wind of Spring brings also remorse. We catch the vague spirit of unrest in the air and we regret our misspent youth. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

The people of Southwest have always been my pride, my joy and my love. Their indomitable dedication and esprit de corps have taken Southwest from a three-airplane dream to a 500-airplane reality. ~ Herb Kelleher

As the days go on toward July, the earth becomes dry and all the flowers begin to thirst for moisture. Then from the hillside, some warm, still evening, the sweet rain-song of the robin echoes clear, and next day we wake up to a dim morning; soft flecks of cloud bar the sun's way, fleecy vapors steal across the sky, the southwest wind blows lightly, rippling the water into little waves that murmur melodiously as they kiss the shore. ~ Celia Thaxter

This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don't subsidize, we don't want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact. ~ Joe Biden

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. ~ John Updike

Take a chance, amaze yourself! ~ C.K. Thomas

Mr. Gunt, Mr. Neal here is a street survivor. We at the airline are honoring the homeless this year, and it was our airline's privilege and delight to offer him the one remaining business-class seat as a token of our faith in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. With the full authority of the EU air-system code behind me, I order you back to 67E. ~ Douglas Coupland

I think there is a shadow network where everybody has infiltrated in terms of hotel concierges, restaurants, will tip off journalists or paparazzi, the airlines, everywhere. ~ Charlotte Church

The fact is Qatar, Etihad, Emirates, Singapore, Garuda, all of the three Chinese airlines, Air New Zealand - the fact is that international aviation relies very much upon agreements between nation-states, and it is not an area in which you have free market operations. ~ Anthony Albanese

Most airlines move too fast in a merger. Speed is not as critical as efficiency. ~ Bill Vaughan

#NoShade, but if United Airlines were a person, it would be Mischa Barton, just real basic AF. ~ Phoebe Robinson

Twelve years ago I left Boston and New York, and moved east and west at the same time. East, to a little village in Devon, England, a town I've been familiar with for years, since my friends Brian and Wendy Froud and Alan Lee all live there. It had long been my dream to live in England, so I finally bought a little old cottage over there. But I decided, both for visa and health reasons, living there half the year would be better than trying to cope with cold, wet Dartmoor winters. At that point, Beth Meacham had moved out to Arizona, and I discovered how wonderful the Southwest is, particularly in the wintertime. Now I spend every winter-spring in Tucson and every summer-autumn in England. Both places strongly affect my writing and my painting. They're very opposite landscapes, and each has a very different mythic history. In Tucson, the population is a mix of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Euro-Americans of various immigrant backgrounds - so the folklore of the place is a mix of all those things, as well as the music and the architecture. The desert has its own colors, light, and rhythms. In Devon, by contrast, it's all Celtic and green and leafy, and the color palette of the place comes straight out of old English paintings - which is more familiar to me, growing up loving the Pre-Raphaelites and England's 'Golden Age' illustrators. I've learned to love an entirely different palette in Arizona, where the starkness of the desert is offset by the brilliance of t ~ Terri Windling

And ever since then [I] have set up businesses basically out of frustration. I mean, I set up Virgin Atlantic with one second-hand 747 because I hated the experience of flying on other people's airlines. And I thought, you know, I could try to create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on. And people liked it. ~ Richard Branson

The only thing I don't like is the uneasiness of dealing with the airlines. Everything, except getting from point A to point B, I still find immensely pleasurable. ~ Verne Lundquist

I was a mechanic in the Navy. And mechanics in the Navy are like mechanics in airlines. You may have more stripes than I do, but you don't know how to fix the airplane. ~ Gordon Bethune

Watership Down is a real place, like all the places in the book. It lies in north Hampshire, about six miles southwest of Newbury and two miles west of Kingsclere. ~ Richard Adams

When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story


-- And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday --
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I'm-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come -
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies --
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other -
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

It was a green stone head of the demon Pazuzu, personification of the southwest wind. ~ William Peter Blatty

I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system so productive. I saw Texas ranchers, hit by drought, demanding government-guaranteed loans; giant milk cooperatives lobbying for higher price supports; major airlines fighting deregulation to preserve their monopoly status; giant companies like Lockheed seeking federal assistance to rescue them from sheer inefficiency; bankers, like David Rockefeller, demanding government bailouts to protect them from their ill-conceived investments; network executives, like William Paley of CBS, fighting to preserve regulatory restrictions and to block the emergence of competitive cable and pay TV. And always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise and their opposition to the arbitrary intervention into our economic life by the state. Except, of course, for their own case, which was always unique and which was justified by their immense concern for the public interest. ~ William E. Simon

At American Airlines, we have built a business around the love of travel that has lasted three quarters of a century. And I'm pretty sure we're just getting started. ~ Gerard Arpey

We just got word that Virgin Airlines (which Branson owns) was awarded a commercial route into Shanghai. So the balloon must be doing some good. ~ Mike Kendrick

Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether. ~ Ann Coulter

But every town had been promising. Every place at first had said, Here you go- You can live here. You can rest here. You can fit. The enormous skies of the Southwest, the shadows that fell over the desert mountains, the innumerable cacti- red-tipped, or yellow-blossomed, or flat-headed- all this had lightened him when he first moved...
...But as with them all, the same hopeful differences--...-- they all became places that sooner or later, one way or another, assured him that he didn't, in fact, fit. ~ Elizabeth Strout

The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival. ~ Bernice Johnson Reagon

Draft-dodging is what chicken-hawks do best. Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh (this capon claimed he had a cyst on his fat ass), Newt Gingrich, former Attorney General John Ashcroft - he received seven deferments to teach business education at Southwest Missouri State - pompous Bill O'Reilly, Jeb Bush, hey, throw in John Wayne - they were all draft-dodgers. Not a single one of these mouth-breathing, cowardly, and meretricious buffoons fought for his country. All plumped for deferments. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Did not serve. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney? Did not serve in the military. (He served the Mormon Church on a thirty-month mission to France.) Former Senator Fred Thompson? Did not serve. Former President Ronald Reagan? Due to poor eyesight, he served in a noncombat role making movies for the Army in southern California during WWII. He later seems to have confused his role as an actor playing a tail gunner with the real thing. Did Rahm Emanuel serve? Yes, he did during the Gulf War 1991 - in the Israeli Army. John Boehner did not serve, not a fucking second. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY? Not a minute! Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-MS? Avoided the draft. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ - did not serve. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn, R-TX - did not serve. Former Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair John Ensign, R-NV? Did not serve. Jack Kemp? Dan Quayle? Never serve ~ Alexander Theroux

The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing. ~ Virginia Postrel

In a couple of days after our arrival, it already became clear that our things were lost forever and would never be found. They put in the paperwork that Emirates Airlines had lost it, although we knew for sure it was all stolen by those girls in the airport of our first departure. ~ Sahara Sanders

It should be noted that people in the free market rarely bear false witness; integrity is the rule. The morning mile, phone calls, planes the airlines buy, autos by the millions - no one could list the instances - are as represented. We have daily, eloquent, enormous testimony that the Ten Commandments can be and are observed by fallible human beings. Contemporary politics is the most glaring of all exceptions. ~ Leonard Read

This is a hard country, brush country, mean country, heartbreak country. Ugly in summer, drought-stricken, dusty, glaring, but in winter it is hideous. ~ John Houghton Allen