GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
WINSTON CHURCHILL

The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous and exacting mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age. Even those masters and princes of aerial fighting, the survivors of fifty mortal duels in the high air who have come scatheless through the War and all its perils, have returned again and again to their love and perished too often in some ordinary commonplace flight undertaken for pure amusement.

Sir Winston Churchill

In The Air, Thoughts and Adventures, 1932.

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing … I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Memo to Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff and the Chiefs of Staff Committee, 28 March 1945. Under pressure from Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, Portal and others, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued a new one on 1 April 1945 omitting the words “acts of terror.”

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. …

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Prime Minster Winston Churchill

Speech to the House of Commons, 18 June 1940. (Hear the original audio on YouTube) First use of the phrase ‘Battle of Britain’. From a long speech, Finest Hour and Battle of Britain were picked up right away. The Times parliamentary report of 19 June 1940 used the sub-heading: “THIS WAS THEIR FINEST HOUR”: BATTLE OF BRITAIN TO BEGIN.

Why, about 300 years ago, when a man was studying aviation and trying to make a flying machine—he was a priest—he abandoned those studies because, he said, “if ever this succeeds there is no city in any country which would not be an object of horrible assaults.” What was regarded with horror in the Middle Ages, and certainly in the last 300 years, is now accepted as an arid commonplace by all politicians and philosophers of civilised Europe at the present time. We have certainly discovered this great secret of the air at a time when the human race has shown that its virtues do not unfit it to receive such a great gift.

Winston Churchill

At the time Member of Parliament for Epping, speech in the House of Commons, 27 July 1937.

When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path. We have no continental army which can defeat the German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm them by this means, without which I do not see a way through. We cannot accept any lower aim than air mastery. When can it be obtained?

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Letter to Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook, 8 July 1940. The Churchill Documents, Volume 15: Never Surrender, May 1940 – December 1940.

We live in a terrible epoch of the human story, but we believe there is a broad and sure justice running through its theme. It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homeland and cities something of the torment they have twice in our lifetime let loose upon their neighbours and upon the world.

We have now intensified for a month past our systematic, scientific, methodical bombing on a large scale of the German cities, seaports, industries and other military objectives. We believe it to be in our power to keep this process going, on a steadily rising tide, month after month, year after year, until the Nazi regime is either extirpated by us or, better still, torn to pieces by the German people themselves.

Prime Minster Winston Churchill

Do Your Worst, And We Will Do Our Best, speech at luncheon hosted by the London County Council following the Hyde Park review of Civil Defence Services, 14 July 1941.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

Falsely attributed to Henry Ford

It's an updated version of “Kites Rise Against and Not With the Wind. Even a Head Wind Is Better than None” that was not coined by Winston Churchill nor is a Chinese Proverb. The Quote Investigator has a long list of various versions, starting in the 1824 New England Farmer periodical, Boston, Massachusetts poem titled New Year’s Address of the New England Farmer’s Boy To His Patrons:

“A school boy thus, to sport inclin’d,
Must drag his kite against the wind,
A long way ere he makes it rise
TO SCRAPE ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE SKIES!