The Flight of the Phoenix Quotes

Elliott: [to Towns, about the makeshift plane] The design is perfect, the only flaw is that we have to rely on you to fly it.

Movie: The Flight of the Phoenix
Frank Towns: Your theory's fine, but you get this mister... that engine's rated at two thousand horsepower and if I was ever fool enough to let it get started up it'd shake your patched-up pile of junk into a thousand pieces, and cut us up into mincemeat with the propeller.

Movie: The Flight of the Phoenix
Frank Towns: Why give people false hope?
Liddle: Come on man.Most folks spend their whole lives holding on to hopes and dreams that are never going to come true but they hold on to them. Why are you going to give up on them now when you need them most?
Frank Towns: You are assuming I'm one of those people who has hopes and dreams.
Liddle: I find it hard to believe that a man who learns to fly never had a dream.
Frank Towns: Look, how can I let those people build that plane when I don't believe it will work? And, every day they waste trying to build it brings them one day closer to dying.
Liddle: I think a man only needs one thing in life. He just needs someone to love. If you can't give him that, then give him something to hope for. And if you can't give him that, just give him something to do.
Frank Towns: James, you'll never make it.
Liddle: Then I'll die trying. There are people counting on me.
Frank Towns: Okay, Okay, Okay. Okay. We'll build it.

Movie: The Flight of the Phoenix
Heinrich Dorfmann: Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?

Movie: The Flight of the Phoenix
Lew Moran: I don't know what your practical navigation's like, but mine's not bad. I wouldn't march ten paces from here. In the daytime it's hitting a hundred and twenty in the shade, and out there, there is no shade.

Movie: The Flight of the Phoenix