Chuck Yeager...............................

Michael Wade posted a quote by Chuck Yeager.  Yeager's story is here.  Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff brought Yeager, the first person to pilot a plane through the "sound barrier", into the limelight of public attention.  Here are a few more quotes:

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.

What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.

If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

One of the iconic moments in The Right Stuff  was when Yeager, pushed the NF-104 Starfighter beyond its capacity:

Yeager posing inspecting the NF-105 Starfighter

Yeager flew the Starfighter some 104,000 feet above the earth

The plane couldn't function at that altitude

the movie version of that flight, with Sam Shepard channeling Yeager, is here.