Charles Lindbergh

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Charles Augustus Lindbergh II (4 February 1902 - 26 August 1974) American aviator, writer; piloted the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927; husband of Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

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• The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?
  • Journal entry (26 August 1938); later published in The Wartime Journals (1970)

• Aviation is a tool especially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe -- one of the priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a sea of Yellow, Black and Brown...

  We can have peace and security only as long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.

  • "Aviation, Geography and Race" in Reader's Digest (November 1939)

• Now, all that I feared would happen has happened. We are at war all over the world, and we are unprepared for it from either a spiritual or a material standpoint. Fortunately, in spite of all that has been said, the oceans are still difficult to cross; and we have the time to adjust and prepare... We can, of course, be raided; but unless we let ourselves go completely to pieces internally, we cannot be invaded successfully.
  But this is only one part of the picture. We are in a war which requires us to attack if we are to win it. We must attack in Asia and in Europe, in fact, all over the world. That means raising and equipping an army of many millions and building shipping, which we have not now got. And after that, if we are to carry through our present war aims, it probably means the bloodiest and most devastating war of all history.
  • Journal entry (11 December 1941); later published in The Wartime Journals (1970)

• We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely.
  Possibly the world will come to its senses sooner than I expect. But, as I have often said, the environment of human life has changed more rapidly and more extensively in recent years than it has ever changed before. When environment changes, there must be a corresponding change in life. That change must be so great that it is not likely to be completed in a decade or in a generation.
  • Journal entry (11 December 1941); later published in The Wartime Journals (1970)

• Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?
  • After visiting the Camp Dora concentration camp in Germany, as quoted in The New York Times (20 April 1980)

• The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day, the sound of our artillery bombarding this Japanese stronghold has floated in across the water. This afternoon, I stood on the cliff outside our quarters (not daring to sit on the ground because of the danger of typhus) and watched the shells bursting on the ridge. For weeks that handful of Japanese soldiers, variously estimated at between 250 and 700 men, has been holding out against overwhelming odds and the heaviest bombardment our well-supplied guns can give them.
  If positions were reversed and our troops held out so courageously and well, their defense would be recorded as one of the most glorious examples of tenacity, bravery, and sacrifice in the history of our nation. But, sitting in the security and relative luxury of our quarters, I listen to American Army officers refer to these Japanese soldiers as "yellow sons of bitches." Their desire is to exterminate the Jap ruthlessly, even cruelly. I have not heard a word of respect or compassion spoken of our enemy since I came here.
  It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy — for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts.
  • Journal entry (21 July 1944); later published in The Wartime Journals (1970)

• It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time.
  • Thoughts on his first parachute jump in The Spirit of St Louis (1953)

• Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.
  • "Is Civilization Progress?" Reader’s Digest (July 1964)

• I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
  • Time (26 May 1967)

• Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.
  • New York Times Magazine (23 May 1971)

• If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
  • Interview (1974)

• I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress.
  • The Gentle Tasaday (foreword, 7 Apr 1974)

Attributed

• "Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?"

• How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?

• I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them.

• In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.

• Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand?

• Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?

• It is the greatest shot of adrenaline to be doing what you have wanted to do so badly. You almost feel like you could fly without the plane.

• Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

• Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests.

• Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

• Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.

• To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.

Quotes of others about Lindbergh

• Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh in War Within and Without (1980)

• He was accused of being anti-Semetic, but in the 45 years I lived with him I never heard him make a remark against the jews, not a crack or joke, and neither did any of our children. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh in The New York Times (20 April 1980)

External links

• Brief biography at the Lindbergh Foundation
• Articles on Lindbergh at The New York Times
• CharlesLindbergh.com