You get in, You shoot, You get out!

I don’t think about life everlasting. If something doesn’t have scientific evidence to back it up, I don’t believe it. I’m a straight shooter.

That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they’re going to do is they’re going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.

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

Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don’t do, you don’t believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.

There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It’s just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn’t, that’s the way it goes.

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.

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It’s your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It’s duty.

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.

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.