“If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.”

“I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”

“At seven p.m., hope is sparked again when some new chirpy airline employee announces that a new plane without that nasty mechanical problem - the aviation of the clap - will arrive around 9 o'clock. Apparently, the old plane would now be used as a decoy plane so that when a plane wasn't available it could be loaded with passengers who could sit there thinking that they would be leaving in fifteen minutes.”

“The safety gap is so large, in fact, that planes would still be safer than cars even if the threat of terrorism were unimaginably worse than it actually is: An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking--a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash.”

“was i leaving a life that, if snuffed out in a plane crash, would leave a sweet aroma representative of what matters most?”

“Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history.”