If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a preference for the natural beauty and freedom of birds over the man-made technology of airplanes.
In this quote, Charles Lindbergh reflects on the intrinsic value and beauty of nature, specifically birds, in contrast to the artificial constructs of human invention such as airplanes. This preference highlights a longing for simplicity, freedom, and the organic experience of life that birds symbolize, suggesting that nature holds a deeper allure than technological advancements.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might quote Lindbergh to emphasize the beauty of wildlife.
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life.
Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?
In honoring the Wright Brothers, it is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright Brothers balanced sucess with modesty, science with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world.
We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow.
We are in grave danger of losing forever not just millions of years of evolution on earth, but the eons of change that have produced man and his natural environment.
A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that's not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define 'nature.'
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.
These stars of earth, these golden flowers.
When some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race-a crocodile, a dandelion, a stony valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint-there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in it and befriend it. They are poets, scientists and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups can be found.
I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
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