Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Augustus Lindbergh, nicknamed Slim, Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle, was an American aviator, author, inventor, military officer, explorer, and social activist. In 1927, at the age of 25, Lindbergh emerged from the virtual obscurity of a U.S. Air Mail pilot to instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo nonstop flight from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France. He flew the distance of nearly 3,600 statute milesin...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPilot
Date of Birth4 February 1902
CityDetroit, MI
CountryUnited States of America
A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them?
My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.
Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?
God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
The essence of life, I concluded, did not lie in the material. It penetrated, but was not bound to, the physical world of science.
Is civilization progress? The challenge, I think, is clear; and, as clearly, the final answer will be given not by our amassing of knowledge, or by the discoveries of our science, or by the speed of our aircraft, but by the effect of our civilized activities as a whole have upon the quality of our planet's life-the life of plants and animals as that of men.
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.
Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
Life is a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
A certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life.
Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests.
What freedom lies in flying, what Godlike power it gives to men . . . I lose all consciousness in this strong unmortal space crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.
Then what am I - the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.
I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.