First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"History has spurts and then is steady, and then maybe even backing up a step, and then forward again."
"The movement of human beings off the planet out into the Universe; first the Moon, and then Mars, and then who knows where, is just beginning and there is nothing that can stop it. None of us know the timetable, none of us know whether it's going to happen rapidly or it's going to happen very slowly. Eventually, as the centuries unfold, human beings will populate all these places and maybe a thousand years from now, or maybe it's two thousand or five thousand, there will be more human beings living off the Earth than live on it. Its just going to happen and we don't need to be anxious about it. We don't need to worry that next year they decide to cut the space station. If they cut the space station next year, I hope they don't, but if they did, it's not the end of the world. We're going to eventually have a wonderful space station. Eventually there are going to be cities in space. If Chicago had been founded a hundred years later, we wouldn't even know that now. I don't know when it was founded, but if it had been a hundred years later or a hundred years earlier, right now it wouldn't make any difference. It would probably look about the same. People would be just as happy doing the same things. That's the same way with space exploration. Maybe we don't go to Mars in my lifetime, maybe we don't even go till my grandkids lifetime. That's okay. Eventually it will happen."
"Apollo is the greatest adventure of all humankind, and it needs to be recorded in every way possible for future generations in books, in movies and on television. … I’m an artist. That’s the way I care about things. Maybe 200 years from now, someone will say, "I’m glad he did that.""
"Everyone is trying to reach for their own stars, and all of those stars aren’t light-years away. They are as close as our job, our family, our children, our next-door neighbors and our good friends."
"I volunteered for a number of reasons. One of these, quite frankly, was that I thought this was a chance for immortality. Pioneering in space was something I would willingly give my life for."
"Godspeed, John Glenn."
"Being on the moon had a profound spiritual impact upon my life. Before I entered space with the Apollo 15 mission in July of 1971, I was a lukewarm Christian, to say the least! I was even a silent Christian, but I feel the Lord sent me to the moon so I could return to the earth and share his Son, Jesus Christ. The entire space achievement is put in proper perspective when one realizes that God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon. I believe that God walked on the earth 2,000 years ago in the person of Jesus Christ. I have totally yielded my life to the Lord’s service to tell people everywhere about the life-changing message of Christ."
"The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God."
"I felt the power of God as I'd never felt it before."
"It's the saddest moment of my life."
"It [traveling to Mars] is important for our future. If the dinosaurs had a space program, they'd still be here."
"The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel."
"To me, there is no greater calling … If I can inspire young people to dedicate themselves to the good of mankind, I've accomplished something."
"I don't think many people remember what life was like in those days … This was the era when the Russians were claiming superiority, and they could make a pretty good case — they put up Sputnik in '57; they had already sent men into space to orbit the earth… There was this fear that perhaps communism was the wave of the future. The astronauts, all of us, really believed we were locked in a battle of democracy versus communism, where the winner would dominate the world."
"I pray every day and I think everybody should. I don't think you can be up here and look out the window as I did the first day and look out at the Earth from this vantage point. We're not so high compared to people who went to the moon and back. But to look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is, to me, impossible. It just strengthens my faith."
"Could this have just happened? . . . I can’t believe that ... Some Power put all this into orbit and keeps it there."
"I Touch the Future — I Teach."
"What are we doing here? We're reaching for the stars."
"Reach for it, you know. Go push yourself as far as you can."
"I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!"
"No teacher has ever been better prepared to teach a lesson."
"May your future be limited only by your dreams!"
"If we die we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men."
"Do good work."
"Give us, O God, the vision which can see Your love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust Your goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts. And show us what each one of us can do to set forward the coming of the day of universal peace."
"When you're finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people."
""God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good." And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth."
"Borman had a Tolstoy quotation on a wall in his office: "The only legitimate happiness is honest hard work and the surmounting of obstacles.""
"Long before the moon mission, I had told NASA that Apollo 8 would be my last flight. It was a decision reached after a long talk with Susan, although the decision was strictly mine."
"This must be what God sees. I was absolutely awestruck, not so much at what we had accomplished but at what made the accomplishment possible. A machine produced by more than three hundred thousand Americans was circling the moon with three human beings aboard for the first time in history."
"There was one more impression we wanted to transmit: our feeling of closeness to the Creator of all things. This was Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968, and I handed Jim and Bill their lines from the Holy Scriptures."
"The Earth was the only thing in the world — in the universe — that had any color. Everything else was black and white but the earth was beautiful blue and white and brownish continents. That was the most impressive sight for me of the entire flight."
"A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of his superior skill."
"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."
"It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission. It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission. So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight. Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight."
"There might be very primitive life in our solar system — single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won't know about that for a long time."
"When you're on Earth, if you go to the top of a mountain, the stars look much brighter than they do at sea level. And because the space shuttle is above Earth's atmosphere, it's like being on a very, very high mountain. So they look brighter, but not bigger."
"The view of Earth is spectacular. The shuttle is pretty close to Earth. It only flies between 200 and 350 miles above Earth. So it's really pretty close. So we don't see the whole planet, like the astronauts who went to the moon did. So we can see much more detail. We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form. It's just a lot of fun and very interesting to look out the window."
"It's easy to sleep floating around — it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!"
"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen. So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion — because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do."
"As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come - but we believe not too long into the future - I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17."
"[(...) here is Cernan on the subject of window gazing:] You have to literally just pinch yourself and ask yourself the question, silently: Do you know where you are at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you can look out the window and you're looking at the most beautiful star in the heavens -- the most beautiful because it's the one we understand and we know, it's home, it's people, family, love, life -- and besides that it is beautiful. You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there's no strings holding it up, and it's moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception."
"It's the last steps that are perhaps more memorable to me than that first step, because I'd been in this valley on the Moon, almost living in a paradox. Sunshine the whole three days we were there. Yet surrounded by the blackest black that we can conceive in our mind, and we don't know how to define it, describe it. We pull words out like infinity, the endlessness of space, the endlessness of time, but we don't know what that is. But I can tell you the endlessness of it all exists, because I saw it with my own eyes. So you're in the middle of this. You're part of this unique part of the universe. Everything's three dimension when you look back at the Earth in all its splendor, in all its glory, multicolors of the blues of the oceans and whites of the snow and the clouds. If your arm were long enough while you're on the surface, it's almost as if you could reach out and put it in the palm of your hand and bring it back close to you and take it home with you. Take it home with you so everybody else could see."
"I felt that I was literally standing on a plateau somewhere out there in space. A plateau that science and technology had allowed me to get to. But now what I was seeing and even more important what I was feeling at that moment in time, science and technology had no answers. Literally no answers because there I was, and there you are, there you were, the earth dynamic, overwhelming.. And I felt that the world just.. There is too much purpose, too much logic, it was just too beautiful to happen by accident. There has to be somebody bigger than you and bigger than me.. And I mean this in a spiritual sense, not in a religious sense, there has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we, ourselves create to govern our lives."
"Gee, I thought we'd be a lot higher at MECO!"
"Don't waste the Earth — it is our Jewel!"
"A son of the proud city of Montclair, New Jersey, Buzz made his mark in the Annals of West Point by standing first in plebe year in academics and in physical education. The proximity of his home town enabled him to escort frequently, proficiently, and with great variety. As evidenced by his fine record at the Academy, Buzz should make a capable, dependable, and efficient officer in the U.S. Air Force."
"A busy eleven minutes later we were in Earth orbit. The Earth didn't look much different from the way it had during my first flight, and yet I kept looking at it. From space it has an almost benign quality. Intellectually one could realize there were wars underway, but emotionally it was impossible to understand such things. The thought reoccurred that wars are generally fought for territory or are disputes over borders; from space the arbitrary borders established on Earth cannot be seen."
"But failure is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you are alive and growing."