“The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit. Hamlet would have been a bad aviator. He worried too much.”
Amelia Earhart
Last Flight (Primary source)
Earhart’s posthumous 1937 journal, compiled from dispatches during her final around-the-world attempt, becomes an inadvertent elegy for American optimism. Her matter-of-fact accounts of technical challenges and geographical wonders now read as her last transmission before vanishing into mystery and legend.
“Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary source“It is far easier to start something than it is to finish it.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary source“Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary source“In my life I had come to realize that when things were going very well indeed it was just the time to anticipate trouble. And, conversely, I learned from pleasant experience that at the most despairing crisis, when all looked sour beyond words, some delightful break was apt to lurk just around the corner.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary sourceMore quotes by Amelia Earhart →
“It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary sourceWorry Flying Risk Decisions Hamlet