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14 Nevil Shute Quotes

Nevil Shute provides plain-spoken thoughts on design, property and trust, with a dash of dry humor.

Nevil Shute quotes

  1. Differential equations won't help you much in the design of aeroplanes - not yet, anyhow.

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  2. He was one of that great class of Englishmen who love their wives and trust them unquestioningly with their money and their honour, but are apt to hedge a little over their motor-cars.

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Also attributed

  1. The thing most worth doing in this modern world [is to] create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work.

  2. If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.

  3. She looked at him in wonder. "Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done." "That's as it may be," he replied. "The fact is, that you did it.

  4. I'm glad we haven't got newspapers now. It's been much nicer without them.

  5. Aircraft do not crash of themselves. They come to grief because men are foolish, or vain, or lazy, or irresolute or reckless. One crash in a thousand may be unavoidable because God wills it so - not more than that.

  6. When I was first sent from H.M.S. King Alfred to be interviewed by Goodeve in the Admiralty, I was furious. The War seemed to me, in June of 1940, to be desperately serious, and England in imminent peril of invasion.

  7. You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.

  8. Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it... Lovely.

  9. Everybody pays lip service to the safety of the aeroplane, but nobody is prepared to pay for it.

  10. To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.

  11. After two wars, I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed, and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life.

  12. The happily married man with a large family is the test pilot for me.