61 Quotes by Chuck Yeager

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

It's really difficult for fanatic churchgoers to understand God can't help me. I'm the only one who can help me.

When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

As we went through mach one, the nose started dropping, so we just cranked that horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up. We got it above mach one, and once we got it above the speed of sound, then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane, so you have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting...You really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight, whether it's combat, or any other kinds of flights, because you really have no control over it...

I have no regrets about my life. People ask, "If you had to do it all over again, would you do it differently?" No. That's speculation.

I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.