Memorable quotes for
The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) More at IMDbPro »

Heinrich Dorfmann: Gentlemen, I have been examining this aeroplane.
Frank Towns: Yeah?
Heinrich Dorfmann: Yes. We've everything we need here to build a new one and fly it out. Now, if you'd like to have a look at my calculations, I don't know whether you can read my handwriting.
Frank Towns: Are you trying to be funny?
Heinrich Dorfmann: What did you say?
Frank Towns: I said, are you trying to be funny?
Heinrich Dorfmann: That is precisely the reaction I would have expected from a man of your obvious limitations.
Share this quote

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.
Share this quote

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.
Share this quote

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
Share this quote

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!
Share this quote

Heinrich Dorfmann: Mr. Towns, you behave as if stupidity were a virtue. Why is that?
Share this quote

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!
Share this quote

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.
Share this quote

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.
Share this quote

Heinrich Dorfmann: I told you there would be no difficulty in building this aeroplane. I also told you it would require an outstanding pilot to fly it. The only thing outstanding about you, Mr. Towns, is your stupidity.
Share this quote

Lew Moran: [of an alternate destination] Three stinkin' mud huts and a poisoned well. That's not a place, it's a disease.
Share this quote

Standish: [nervously] The sandstorm'll make it more difficult, won't it?
'Ratbags' Crow: [in a mocking, ironic tone] What? Find us? Nah, it'll simplify things no end, old chap! They'll just bloody give up! Oh, you're not frightened, are ya? You don't want to be despondent, old man, you know! Wait till the water runs out. Then you'll really start laughing!
Share this quote

Lew Moran: It may not be the best possible advertisement. but Frank Towns is probably one of the few really great pilots left in thios push-button world of yours.
Heinrich Dorfmann: Oh, really?
Lew Moran: [angrily] Yes, 'Oh, really!' He was flying by the seat of his pants in planes that were nothing more than bits and pieces before you even went to school!
Heinrich Dorfmann: That's precisely what is wrong - he has remembered everything and learned nothing!
Share this quote

'Ratbags' Crow: Sometimes I wonder how you chaps never won the war.
Heinrich Dorfmann: War?
'Ratbags' Crow: [making sputtering sounds like an airplane and gesturung to suggest a plane flying in a mocking fashion]
Heinrich Dorfmann: [trying not to respond in kind] I wasn't involved.
'Ratbags' Crow: [makes a sound like a machine gun, falls down on the sand, and rolls over] That's it then! That's why they never won!
'Ratbags' Crow: [in a mocking tone] They didn't have old Heinrich!
Share this quote

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.
Share this quote

Standish: Insurance companies move in mysterious ways. Much like God... only far less generous.
Share this quote

'Ratbags' Crow: Don't forget to put it down in your diary, how very, very nice it was at the party here until the booze ran out!
Share this quote