I don’t think there’s a pilot who hasn’t heard that quote. But who said it? It’s always ‘Anonymous’.
I was going to post that in General Questions, but I googled it first. One page I found says that the originator was Captain A. G. Lamplugh, British Aviation Insurance Group, London, in the early-1930s. The person who posted that information said he’d been in touch with R. E. G. Davis, curator of air transport history at the Smithsonian Institution. Googling part of the quote and ‘Lamplugh’ turns up a couple of (unreferenced) articles that agree. (Well, they would since I searched on the name.)
Speaking of landings, when I was first learning to fly we were shooting touch-and-goes. After one landing my instructor said he’d take over to demonstrate what he wanted. After we got airborne I asked him (genuinely curious), ‘Is there a reason we took off with full (40º) flaps?’ He’d forgotten to raise them.