The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.
Examine the history of China for 2,000 years back, and then compare it with the Western history of fifty years! Does the government of these foreign countries present such a record of generosity, benevolence, loyalty, and honesty as ours?
This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.
I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.
