Our list of the best quotes from Apple TV+ television show created by John Shiban and John Orloff, based on Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name. Masters of the Air follows the men of the 100th Bomb Group (the “Bloody Hundredth”) as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with the frigid conditions, lack of oxygen, and sheer terror of combat conducted in the air. It portrays the psychological and emotional price paid by these young men as they helped destroy the horror of Hitler’s Third Reich. Some were shot down and captured, some were wounded or killed. And some were lucky enough to make it home. Regardless of individual fate, a toll was exacted on them all. See more about Masters of the Air on Amazon.
Masters of the Air is available to watch on Apple TV+.
1. Part One
Peggy: So you’re Bucky, and he’s Buck?
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: It’s a long story.
Marge: Everyone needs someone to write to back home.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: I don’t know if John Egan’s the pen pal type.
Marge: Well, maybe if he met a girl worth writing to, he would be.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: Well, a girl worth writing to is hard to find.
Marge: Not if you know where to look.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: Ah. I see what you mean.
'There are two kinds of pilots, those who have had a wheels-up landing and those who will.' - Maj. John 'Bucky' Egan (Masters of the Air) Click To Tweet
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Hey. You know, I am amazed that we’re friends. You don’t like to dance with a beautiful woman. You don’t drink. You don’t gamble. You don’t even like sports.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: Well, we are one of life’s great mysteries.
2. Part Two
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Do you feel anything?
Lt. Curtis Biddick: Yeah. I miss those guys.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Because me, I don’t feel a thing.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: I got to meet that goddamn new CO. First thing tomorrow.
Lt. Curtis Biddick: Today is tomorrow.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: You know, if this whole thing ended, and there were only two pilots left up in the air, it’d be me and it’d be you, Buck.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: Don’t count on it.
3. Part Three
Maj. ‘Red’ Bowman: You’re headed to Africa, gentlemen. The 12th Air Force will welcome you with open arms, ice-cold beer and lobster tails. It’ll be like a holiday.
Cpt. Everett Blakely: You’re on the way through purgatory and you reach a fork in the road. One road goes to Valhalla, the other goes to hell. Damnation. On each of the road is a goblin. One goblin always tells the truth. The other is a tricky little f***er. He always lies. Okay? What’s the one question that you need to ask that’s going to tell you the right way to go?
Lt. Harry Crosby: Do you ask it, “Are you the good goblin?”
Cpt. Everett Blakely: No. No, but you’re getting closer. You’re smarter than I thought, Croz.
4. Part Four
'The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel. Every second is a little death.' - Paulina (Masters of the Air) Click To Tweet
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: All these are new faces. We go down, they won’t remember us either. Like we never existed, Buck.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: What does it matter?
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Nothing, I guess.
Col. ‘Chick’ Harding: You know how we could end this whole thing tonight? We fill up one of our forts with as many five hundred pounders as she can hold, we bomb the hell out of Hitler’s hidey-hole. I’m sure Red and Bubbles could locate that mustachioed little f***er.
'There is no balance. Just one event after another. The worst come out untouched. The innocent dead.' - Paulina (Masters of the Air) Click To Tweet
Jean Achten: Here stupid means dead.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Never been on the business end of a bomb before.
Paulina: Business. A funny word for death.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: I’ve dropped a lot of those things. Probably done a lot of killing. Hell of a job.
Paulina: Does it weigh on your conscience?
Paulina: The Germans deserve every last one of your bombs. Some believe there is a difference between war and senseless murder. They don’t.
Lt. Nash: I think you might be the last pretty face I ever see.
Helen: Don’t say that.
Lt. Nash: And damned if you ain’t the prettiest.
5. Part Five
Cpt. Harry Crosby: I also saw Major Cleven’s plane take a direct hit and go down. From the day I joined the 100th, Buck Cleven was our leader. We thought he was invincible. If Gale Cleven couldn’t make it, who could?
Cpt. Harry Crosby: The hardest part of any mission was the anticipation. The waiting.
Maj. Jack Kidd: Where are our boys, Chick?
Col. ‘Chick’ Harding: He said none of them made it.
Cpt. Harry Crosby: None of them?
Lt. ‘Bubbles’ Payne: [as Crosby reads Bubble letter to his wife] Dear Jean, You know this already, but your husband was the best friend I ever had. He was also the best navigator I ever met, even though he was too humble to admit it to himself. Takes a special kind of courage for a man to stay modest surrounded by blustering blowhards in every direction, but that was Croz. I wish more than anything it was him sitting here and not me, and then no one would have to write this letter.
6. Part Six
German Farmer: [to Bucky] For you, the war’s over.
Cpt. Harry Crosby: When a crew went down, they disappeared. No more than four months at Thorpe Abbotts until thirty-two of the thirty-five original crews were among the missing. We did not talk about such crews. Those of us who continued to fly mission after mission had to tiptoe around their ghosts.
Sandra Westgate: What we all need in life is someone to heave with, shoulder to shoulder.
Cpt. Harry Crosby: Some of the men were coming undone. They’d seen too many planes blow up in front of them and too many friends killed. Some people drank. Some people fought. Some people slept around. If you got a chance to forget, you took it.
7. Part Seven
Cpt. Harry Crosby: Nothing gave us more hope than the return of men we thought were lost. Lucky for them, there was a rule that if a downed flyer made it out of occupied Europe, he wasn’t allowed to fly any more missions. Because if a flyer got shot down again, and was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, they knew too much about the escape routes, and the French and Belgian men and women who had assisted them. The lucky b****rds got a ticket home.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: These goddamn goons are going to take us out one at a time, Buck.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: [after telling Bucky that he’d proposed to Marge in his letter] I was even thinking maybe you’d be my best man.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: I will be your best man.
8. Part Eight
Hans Scharf: Why do you fight for a country who treats you like that?
Lt. Richard D. Macon: Do you know any other country that’s better? I know what my country’s shortcomings are. And I know it’s trying hard to become what it says it’s supposed to be. And when I get back, I’m going to help them do that a lot faster.
Cpt. Erwin B. Lawrence: You’re a clever fella, Alex. But don’t let smart be the enemy of happy.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Well, I’m great, is the truth. I’ve been here for eight months now. Still trapped, still cold, still eating scraps. And we keep waiting for something to happen, even though it doesn’t.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: It could be worse. We could be dead.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Well, maybe for you. At least that I could stand. I can’t stand this.
Maj. Harry Crosby: [as he’s having to stay awake for 72 hours] The lack of sleep, the coffee, the uppers, the stress, the fear, the disconnect. That’s a drug in itself.
Maj. Harry Crosby: Sixty-four hours. You just try to survive, breath by breath, step by step.
Lt. Col. John Bennett: Any last words of wisdom, sir?
Maj. Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal: No. No, I don’t have any last words because I’m going to see you again. Alright? Just take off, do your job, you land, and then you’re going to be giving me some words of wisdom. Each flight is its own lesson.
Maj. Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal: You excited to see Jean?
Maj. Harry Crosby: I mean, what if it’s not the same?
Maj. Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal: Nothing’s the same, Croz. Nothing. Never will be.
Maj. Harry Crosby: Ain’t that the truth.
9. Part Nine
'Whoever fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself. Because if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes right back into you.' - Maj. Harry Crosby (Masters of the Air) Click To Tweet
Maj. Harry Crosby: By the first few weeks of 1945, we were closing in on the Third Reich from all sides. In the west, the Allies were storming into Germany. In the east, the Russians were approaching the Oder River. And in the sky, the Eighth Air Force flew uncontested. We were the true masters of the air.
Polish Refugee: He says if God exists, He has forgotten him. Not even the earth that covers our bones will remember us.
'To live one must make choices.' - Polish Refugee (Masters of the Air) Click To Tweet
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: We move tonight or we don’t move at all.
Maj. Harry Crosby: You know, all this killing we do, you know, day in, day out, does something to a guy. Makes him different, not in a good way.
Maj. Harry Crosby: You know, Rosie, sometimes I wake up, I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror.
Maj. Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal: We’re here to fight the monsters, Croz. And, yeah. Yeah, that’s made us do some tough things. But we had to. There’s no other way. The things these people are capable of. No, they got it coming. Trust me. They got it coming.
Maj. Harry Crosby: So Bucky didn’t make the breakout with you, huh?
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: No. No, Bucky had to, he had to stay behind with the men.
Maj. Harry Crosby: He’s okay though, right?
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: Yeah, when do you ever know him not to be okay?
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: Look who it is. Stone in my shoe.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: Oh, I’m back.
Maj. Harry Crosby: At first, it felt unreal, impossible, unimaginable. And then, inevitable. We were going home. All of us. I had a wife to see. A son. A life to start.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: This is it.
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: This is it.
Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven: You ready to go home?
Maj. John ‘Bucky’ Egan: You ready to see Marge?
'On occasion, the world must confront itself, answer what we are with who we are.' - Maj. Harry Crosby (Masters of the Air) Click To Tweet
Maj. Harry Crosby: I was going home. I just wished more of us were.