Quotes by Aeronautical Engineers

Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this.
Nevil Shute
You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.
Nevil Shute
You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we'd been wise enough.
Nevil Shute
I cared not a whit whether Time were “a form of thought,” or an aspect of reality, or (this was later) compoundable with Space. What I wanted to know was: How it got mixed?
J.W. Dunne
If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.
Nevil Shute
There's no dignity, no decency, or health today for men that haven't got a job. All other things depend on work today.
Nevil Shute
If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys absolutely the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe.
J.W. Dunne
You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.
Nevil Shute
Workers must root out the idea that by keeping the results of their labors to themselves a fortune will be assured to them. Patent fees are so much wasted money. The flying machine of the future will not be born fully fledged and capable of a flight for 1,000 miles or so. Like everything else it must be evolved gradually. The first difficulty is to get a thing that will fly at all. When this is made, a full description should be published as an aid to others. Excellence of design and workmanship will always defy competition. (1894)
Lawrence Hargrave
People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.
Nevil Shute
it was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains....we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.
Nevil Shute
I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly
Nevil Shute
No, there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in Time.
J.W. Dunne
In my own case, I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all.
J.W. Dunne
It was a gambler's action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.
Nevil Shute