GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
AMELIA EARHART

Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.

Amelia Earhart

Written circa 1928. Published in Amelia, My Courageous Sister: Biography of Amelia Earhart, 1987.

Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things;
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.

Amelia Earhart

1927. Published as Courage, Survey magazine, 1 July 1928.

I am not urging the employment of unqualified women in the aviation industry. All I hope is that those who have ability and who get adequate training by some means, will be given a chance to make a living as pilots, if they wish to.

Amelia Earhart

Why Are Women Afraid to Fly, Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan, July 1929.

The next great achievement for women in flying does not lie in the direction of the spectacular, but in attaining their place in the regularly-scheduled air lines as pilots and mechanics—establishing their place in the industry on an equality with men.

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart is most modest about her flights, Vancouver Daily Province newspaper, 4 February 1933.

In aviation as a whole, women are outnumbered forty to one, but I feel that more will gain admittance as a greater number knock at the door. If and when you knock at the door, it might be well to bring an ax along; you may have to chop your way through.

Amelia Earhart

1934 speech 'Choosing a Career', quoted in 1997 book East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart.

Because of [Amelia Earhart], we had more women available to fly in the 1940’s to help us get through World War II. And because of these women, women of my generation are able to look back and say, ‘Hey, they did it. They even flew military airplanes, we can do it, too.’

Col. Eileen Collins USAF

Television interview 100 Years of Great women, on ABC with Barbara Walters, 30 April 1999.

See three other Eileen Collins great aviation quotes.

You don't think of yourself when you’re flying any more than you do in driving a car. You don’t ask yourself in a traffic emergency, “Is my hat on straight?” You just think, “Can I get through that hole?” It’s only the backseat drivers who have their minds on themselves … You become a part of the machine.

Amelia Earhart

Quoted in Flying Doesn’t Thrill Amelia—It’s Scenery, Milwaukee Journal newspaper, 29 October 1932.

There are slim ones and plump ones and quiet ones and those who talk all the time. They’re large and small, young and old, and half the list are married and many of these have children. In a word, they are simply thoroughly normal girls and women who happen to have taken up flying rather than golf, swimming or steeplechasing.

Amelia Earhart

Regards women pilots. In her 1932 book The Fun of It.

The trouble nowadays, as it has been always, woman is bred to timidity. This is what handicaps them. From the time they first go to school little girls are taught to be afraid of certain things. In reality most women are just as strong as men. In fact they could do most things as well as men if they were only educated the same way.

Amelia Earhart

Seattle Daily Times newspaper, 15 July 1930.

The trouble nowadays, as it has been always, woman is bred to timidity. This is what handicaps them. From the time they first go to school little girls are taught to be afraid of certain things. In reality most women are just as strong as men. In fact they could do most things as well as men if they were only educated the same way.

Amelia Earhart

Inbred Timidity Handicap to Women, Says Amelia Earhart, Seattle Daily Times, 15 July 1930. Earhart was influenced here by Dora Russell, author in 1927 of The Right to Be Happy, who described women as being bred for timidity.

Men do not believe us capable. We can fly—you know that. Ever since we started we’ve batted our heads against a stone wall. Manufacturers refuse us planes. The public have no confidence in our ability. If we had access to the equipment and training men have, we could certainly do as well. Thank heaven, we continue willingly fighting a losing battle. …

But if enough of us keep trying, we’ll get someplace.

Amelia Earhart

Quoted in Louise Thaden’s 1938 book High, Wide and Frightened.

I was a passenger on the journey—just a passenger. Everything that was done to bring us across was done by Wilmer Stultz and Slim Gordon. Any praise I can give them … they ought to have. You can’t pile it on too thick … I did not handle the controls once, although I have had more than 500 hurs solo flying and once held the women’s altitude record. I do not believe that women lack the stamina to do a solo trip across the Atlantic, but it would be a matter of learning the arts of flying by instruments only, an art which few men pilots know perfectly now.

Amelia Earhart

Advertised as the first flight of a woman across the Atlantic. Although she was promised time at the controls, Earhart never flew the plane during the over 20-hour flight with Wilmer 'Bill' Stultz and Louis 'Slim' Gordon. The New York Times, 19 June 1928.

Too often little attention is paid to individual talent. instead, education goes on dividing people according to their sex, and putting them in little feminine or masculine pigeonholes … Girls are shielded and sometimes helped so much that they lose initiative and begin to believe the signs ‘Girls don’t’ and ‘Girls can’t’ which mark their paths… Consequently, it seems almost necessary to evolve different methods of instruction for them when they later take up the same subjects. For example, those courses which involve mechanical work may have to be explained somewhat differently to girls not because girls are inherently not mechanical, but because normally they have learned little about such things in the course of their education.

Amelia Earhart

The Fun of It, 1932.

Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?

Attributed to Amelia Earhart

Quoted in the 2025 book The Aviator and the Showman Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon.