Lilienthal Quotes & Sayings

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything. — Otto Lilienthal

It is chiefly upon the lay citizen, informed about science but not its practitioner, that the country must depend in determining the use to which science is put, in resolving the many public policy questions that scientific discoveries constantly force upon us. — David Lilienthal

No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once. — Otto Lilienthal

The idea of Utopia is mischievous as well as unrealistic. And dull, to boot. Man is born pushing and shoving as the sparks fly upward. — David Lilienthal

We keep saying, 'We have no other course.' What we should say is: 'We are not bright enough to see any other course.' — David Lilienthal

It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird," Lilienthal had written. "It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight. — David McCullough

All flight is based upon producing air pressure, all flight energy consists in overcoming air pressure. — Otto Lilienthal

Small sacrifices must be made. — Otto Lilienthal

Centralization at the national capital or within a business undertaking always glorifies the importance of pieces of paper This dims the sense of reality. — David Lilienthal

Big business is basic to the very life of this country; and yet many -perhaps most - Americans have a deep-seated fear and an emotional repugnance to it. Here is monumental contradiction. — David Lilienthal

Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted. — Otto Lilienthal

Particular honour belongs to those who believed in the possibility of mechanical flight when all the world was against them; not the visionaries because they hoped for it merely, but those who by sheer force of intellect perceived the means by which it could be accomplished and directed their experiments along the right path ... The name of Lilienthal is now among the most honoured, but curiously his own countrymen were the last to recognize the value of his work. — Otto Lilienthal

The subject of management is man; the objective of management is the moving of man's mind and will and imagination. — David Lilienthal

Within the next few years-a decade perhaps-we should be in a position to unlock new knowledge about life and matter so great that wholly new concepts of human life will follow in the wake of this new knowledge. — David Lilienthal

The manager-leader of the future should combine in one personality the robust, realistic quality of the man of action with the insight of the artist, the religious leader, the poet, who explains man to himself. The man of action alone or the man of contemplation alone will not be enough; these two qualities together are required. — David Lilienthal

One can get a proper insight into the practice of flying only by actual flying experiments ... The manner in which we have to meet the irregularities of the wind, when soaring in the air, can only be learnt by being in the air itself ... The only way which leads us to a quick development in human flight is a systematic and energetic practice in actual flying experiments. — Otto Lilienthal

In "Big Business," Lilienthal argues that not only the productive and distributive superiority of the United States but also its national security depends on industrial bigness; that we now have adequate public safeguards against abuses of big business, or know well enough how to fashion them as required; that big business does not tend to destroy small business, as is often supposed, but, rather, tends to promote it; and, finally, that a big-business society does not suppress individualism, as most intellectuals believe, but actually tends to encourage it by reducing poverty, disease, and physical insecurity and increasing the opportunities for leisure and travel. — John Brooks

Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound. — H.G.Wells

We returned home, after these experiments, with the conviction that sailing flight was not the exclusive prerogative of birds. — Otto Lilienthal

Artificial flight may be defined as that form of aviation in which a man flies at will in any direction by means of an apparatus attached to his body, the use of which requires personal skill. Artificial flight by a single individual is the proper beginning for all species of artificial flight, as the necessary conditions can most easily be fulfilled when man flies individually. — Otto Lilienthal

But we must admit the possibility that continued investigation and experience will bring us ever nearer to that solemn moment, when the first man will rise from earth by means of wings, if only for a few seconds, and mark that historical moment which heralds the inauguration of a new era in our civilization. — Otto Lilienthal

Out of the best and most productive years of each man's life, he should carve a segment in which he puts his private career aside to serve his community and his country, and thereby serve his children, his neighbours, his fellow men, and the cause of freedom. — David Lilienthal

Whether happiness or unhappiness, freedom or slavery, in short whether good or evil results from an improved environment depends largely upon how the change has been brought about, upon the methods by which the physical results have been reached, and in what spirit and for what purpose the fruits of that change are used. Because a higher standard of living, a greater productiveness and a command over nature are not good in and of themselves does not mean that we cannot make good of them, that they cannot be a source of inner strength. — David Lilienthal