“The way the public sees it is this. If we don’t leave, we are idiots. If we do leave but don’t succeed in our mission, we are incompetent. But if we do succeed, it’s because it was easy and anyone could have done it.”

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

I’m learning kite surfing. It’s a little surfboard you have on your feet with straps, and you have a big kite like a power glider in the air that pulls you. You don’t need waves to move, and it makes a big spray of water as you go.

Pioneering spirit should continue, not to conquer the planet or space … but rather to improve the quality of life.

Welcome to those who believe in the power of dreams and who would like to join me in my exploration of life.

Adventure is something out of the usual pattern, a point at which you cannot avoid confronting the unknown, so that you have to dig inside yourself to find the courage and resources to deal with what may lie ahead, and to succeed.

My life and the life of my family has to do with exploration, with adventure. My grandfather was the first man in the stratosphere, and my father was the first to touch the deepest point in the ocean… For me, adventure and exploration is something in the blood.

Nothing can prevent us from another day and night, and the myth of perpetual flight.

A movie I must have seen 10 times is ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull.’ It’s an old movie, but still such a beautiful message. If I had only one film I could take on my computer on a desert island, I would take ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull.’

The pioneering spirit is less about thinking up new ideas, as ridding ourselves of dogmas and habits that hold us captive in thinking.

We know that dreams fuel innovation.

We couldn’t stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II.

It’s very cool for me to be able to get in an airplane and fly for fourteen hours

We still have a problem here in this country of access to airports and airplanes [for terrorists].

Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well.

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.

If I make a set of rules, then a guy goes out and steals an airplane. He comes back and says, ‘It wasn’t in the rules.’

I don’t travel by airplane. I mean that because when my wife, my kids and I travel on trains or boats, we meet a lot of people and we talk to them.

Airplanes are the most beautiful when they are in the air.