Wright Brothers (Orville & Wilbur) — "The only bird that could speak told us what it knew, but we didn’t understand it…"

"No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, a…"

"The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their monotonous lives, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, on the wings of the wind."

"We were not as a matter of fact in the habit of thinking of the future. We were too busy with the present."

"It is not necessary to be a genius to be an inventor."

"It is a question of whether the machine was designed to be beautiful, or beautiful because it was well designed."