The Wright brothers, American inventors and aviation pioneers, achieved the first powered, sustained airplane flight in 1903 and constructed the first practical airplane in 1905.
Sons of Milton Wright, a minister and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright, they grew up in a household that encouraged intellectual pursuits.
Their father’s involvement in church disputes and his staunch principles significantly influenced them.
Neither brother attended college due to Wilbur’s accident and their mother’s subsequent death.
Instead, they set up a print shop, producing newspapers and building quality printing presses.
By 1892, they ventured into the bicycle business, using the profits to fund their aviation experiments.
Their aeronautical interest was sparked by childhood toys and was later fueled by reports of German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal’s work and his fatal glider crash in 1896.
Their research led them to connect with aviation experts like Octave Chanute.
I have listed below the top quotes by Wright Brothers.
Best Wright Brothers Quotes
What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery. ~ Wright Brothers.
It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill. ~ Wright Brothers.
We could hardly wait to get up in the morning. ~ Wilbur Wright.
If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance. ~ Wright Brothers.
If the Wright Brothers were alive today, Orville would have to lay off Wilbur. ~ Robert Crandall.
The fact that the great scientist believed in flying machines was the one thing that encouraged us to begin our studies. ~ Wilbur Wright.
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris…[because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping. ~ Orville Wright.
What one man can do himself directly is but little. If however he can stir up ten others to take up the task he has accomplished much. ~ Wright Brothers.
We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity. ~ Wright Brothers.
Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready. ~ Wright Brothers.
After these years of experience I look with amazement upon our audacity in attempting flights with a new and untried machine under such circumstances. ~ Wright Brothers.
Famous Wright Brothers Quotes
The exhilaration of flying is too keen, the pleasure too great, for it to be neglected as a sport. ~ Orville Wright.
If birds can glide for long periods of time, then… why can’t I? ~ Wright Brothers.
I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for 50 years. ~ Wilbur Wright.
The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air. ~ Wright Brothers.
Men become wise just as they become rich, more by what they save than by what they receive. ~ Wilbur Wright.
It was the first time in the history of the world that a machine carrying a man and driven by a motor had lifted itself from the ground in free flight. ~ Orville Wright.
Inspiring Wright Brothers Quotes
When the machine had been fastened with a wire to the track so that it could not start until released by the operator, and the motor had been run to make sure that it was in condition, we tossed a coin to decide who should have the first trial. Wilbur won. ~ Orville Wright.
When the machine was flown as a kite, the wing with the greater angle always had the greater lift, because the kite cords or cables prevented one wing from attaining a higher speed through the air than the other. ~ Orville Wright.
The balancing of a flyer may seem, at first thought, to be a very simple matter, yet almost every experimenter had found in this one point which he could not satisfactorily master. ~ Orville Wright.
Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them! ~ Wright Brothers.
With 12 horsepower at our command, we considered that we could permit the weight of the machine with an operator to rise to 750 or 800 pounds, and still have as much surplus power as we had originally allowed for in the first estimate of 550 pounds. ~ Orville Wright.
The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall. ~ Wright Brothers.
We wrote to a number of the best known automobile manufacturers in an endeavor to secure a motor for the new machine. Not receiving favorable answers from any of these we proceeded to design a motor of our own. ~ Orville Wright.
We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. ~ Wright Brothers.
Top Wright Brothers Quotes
Man, by reason of his greater intellect, can more reasonably hope to equal birds in knowledge than to equal nature in the perfection of her machinery. ~ Wright Brothers.
The course of the flight up and down was exceedingly erratic, partly due to the irregularity of the air, and partly to lack of experience in handling this machine. The control of the front rudder was difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center. ~ Orville Wright.
The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility. ~ Charles Kettering.
Our own growing belief that man might nevertheless learn to fly was based on the idea that while thousands of the most dissimilar body structures, such as insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, were flying every day at pleasure, it was reasonable to suppose that man might also fly. ~ Wright Brothers.
My brother and I became seriously interested in the problem of human flight in 1899 … We knew that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly, he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility. ~ Wright Brothers.
Thousands of men had thought about flying machines and a few had even built machines which they called flying machines, but these were guilty of almost everything except flying. ~ Wright Brothers.
There is no sport equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost if you can conceive of such a combination. ~ Wright Brothers.
Popular Wright Brothers Quotes
I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then, if possible, add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success. ~ Wilbur Wright.
The Wright brothers’ first flight was not reported in a single newspaper because every rookie reporter knew what could and couldn’t be done. ~ Edward R. Murrow.
For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. ~ Wright Brothers.
With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of flights in the last ten years, I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a twenty-seven mile wind, even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was safe. ~ Wright Brothers.
In our gliding experiments, we had had a number of experiences in which we had landed upon one wing, but the crushing of the wing had absorbed the shock so that we were not uneasy about the motor in case of a landing of that kind. ~ Orville Wright.
Quotes About Wright Brothers
If the Wright brothers hadn’t put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers. ~ Felix Baumgartner.
In 1903 the Wright brothers invented airplanes, because in 1902 they took a road trip across the country with their family. ~ Bill Engvall.
They say that most airline seats on planes today are meant for 170-pound passengers. The last time the average American weighed 170 pounds, the Wright Brothers were flying the plane. ~ Jay Leno.
I love visiting the Air and Space Museum. It always blows my mind how far we’ve come from the Wright Brothers in 1906 to modern space travel. ~ Ryan Merchant.
The Wright brothers’ first flight was shorter than a Boeing 747’s wingspan. We’ve just begun with heart transplants. ~ C. Walton Lillehei.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. ~ Carl Sagan.
Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque “Wilbur,” thereby becoming “Orville” in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation. ~ Peter Schjeldahl.
There’s a historical milestone in the fact that our Apollo 11 landing on the moon took place a mere 66 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight. ~ Buzz Aldrin.
There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, ‘Ooh, hey, I can do that.’ There’s only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots. ~ Burt Rutan.
Greek myths are heroic, noble and tragic; but the American Dream is heroic, comical, and uplifting. Americans are a people in whom overweening ambition is rewarded, not punished. The Wright Brothers did not have their wings melt when they flew too high. Perhaps their wings were more soundly built than those of Icarus. ~ John C. Wright.
We are ever on the threshold of new journeys and new discoveries. Can you imagine the excitement of the Wright brothers on the morning of that first flight? The anticipation of Jonas Salk as he analyzed the data that demonstrated a way to prevent polio? ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin.
The movies I respond to are by guys like the Coen brothers and Edgar Wright, where it’s hard to fit them into any one box. ~ Drew Goddard.
I was attacked the other night for being grandiose. I would just want you to note: Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright Brothers standing at Kitty Hawk were grandiose. John F. Kennedy was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am grandiose and that Americans are instinctively grandiose. ~ Newt Gingrich.
Inspirational Wright Brothers Quotes
The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together. ~ Bill Gates.
Fear would have told the Wright brothers not to fly. Fear would have told Rosa Parks to change seats. Fear would have told Steve Jobs that people hate touchscreens. ~ Jon Acuff.
There was a flight from Cleveland to New York City with just two people on board. There hasn’t been two people on an airplane since the Wright brothers. ~ David Letterman.
The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility. ~ Dorothea Brande.
Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles. ~ Freeman Dyson.
If the F.A.A. was around when the Wright Brothers were testing their aircraft, they would never have been able to make their first flight at Kitty Hawk. ~ Larry Walters.
So these were the 56 quotes from Wright Brothers.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read our other posts on Facade quotes and Morning Glory quotes.
