Richard Attenborough
(as Lew Moran)
Lew Moran:
[of an alternate destination] Three stinkin' mud huts and a poisoned well. That's not a place, it's a disease.
Richard Attenborough
(as Lew Moran)
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.
Richard Attenborough
(as Lew Moran)
Lew Moran:
If you marched a hundred and six miles by the stars and your calculations were just one per cent out, you could pass the Eiffel Tower in daylight and never even see it.
Richard Attenborough
(as Lew Moran)
Lew Moran:
Maybe Frank Towns, who's flown every crate they've ever built and could fly in and out of a tennis court if he had to, maybe that great hell-for-leather trailblazer's nothing more than a back number now. And maybe men like Dorfmann can build machines that can do Frank Towns's job for him, and do it better
James Stewart
(as Frank Towns)
Lew Moran:
Time was you could take real pride, in just getting there, flying used to be fun Lou, it really was.
Frank Towns: He's crazy Lou, he builds toy airplanes.
Frank Towns: He's crazy Lou, he builds toy airplanes.
Richard Attenborough
(as Lew Moran)
Lew Moran:
You told Towns he was behaving as if stupidity was a virtue. If he's making it into a virtue, YOU'RE MAKING IT INTO A BLOODY SCIENCE!
Richard Attenborough
(as Lew Moran)
Frank Towns:
I've lost five men, Lew. Gabriel in there, he's on the way, that'll be six. Are you asking me to try to kill the rest of them trying to get a deathtrap off the ground. I don't know... I don't know, Lew. It won't work... it just can't work.
Lew Moran: All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.
Lew Moran: All right, then, it can't. Maybe it can't and we'll all be killed. But if there's just one chance in a thousand that he's got something, boy, I'd rather take it than just sit around here waiting to die.
James Stewart
(as Frank Towns)
Frank Towns:
If you hadn't made a career out of being a drunk you might not have been a second-rate navigator in a firth-rate outfit. And if you'd not stayed in your bunk to kill that last bottle, maybe you might have checked that engineer's report on the radio and we might not be here now. All right!
James Stewart
(as Frank Towns)
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.
Dan Duryea
(as Standish)
