"There's no question that all the generations got excited about the first flights, with Kennedy's inspiration to go to the moon, leaving the planet for the first time, and fortunately coming back."

"Certainly Shepard's flight was a major moment in American history and it clearly showed we were going to respond to the Soviet challenge."

"Alan Shepard was a great man, a great leader. We were pioneers. If you are an explorer, what more can you ask than to travel into space."

"One can make the argument that the success of the Shepard flight enabled the decision to go to the moon."

"His flight was a tremendous statement about tenacity, courage and brilliance. He crawled on top of that rocket that had never before flown into space with a person aboard, and he did it. That was an unbelievable act of courage."

"His service will always loom large in America's history. He is one of the great heroes of modern America."

"With the passing of Alan Shepard, our nation has lost an outstanding patriot, one of its finest pilots -and I have lost a very close friend."

"Now that we've lost Alan Shepard, I can't help feeling that something is wrong with this picture; astronauts aren't supposed to grow old and leave this Earth forever. In our memories, they remain as Shepard was on that sunny Friday morning in May 1961, when he lay inside a tiny Mercury capsule ready to be hurled into space atop a Redstone booster."

"The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder."

"We're going to see passengers in space stations in 15 years, who will be able to buy a ticket and spend a weekend in space."

"We had some adverse conditions in the '60s, in the '70s and the '80s. The agency has risen above that in the past and will rise above that again."

"The same way people are now paying a couple thousand dollars to fly to other parts of the world, people will be paying $50,000 to spend a weekend on a space station."

"This is the first time that astronauts of the first group have exhibited things that are personal and sentimental to them. We hope it will encourage youngsters to follow in our footsteps."

"I just wanted to be the first one to fly for America, not because I'd end up in the pages of history books."

"No way that any astronaut worth his salt volunteered for the space program to become a hero. You don't select astronauts who want fame and fortune. You select them because they're the best test pilots in the world, they know it, and it's a personal challenge for them. And the astronauts of today are exactly the same."

"If we had said 30 years ago that we were going to have only two incidents with casualties, we would have thought, 'Boy, that's great. To me, that indicates that the program has really exceeded what the early expectations were."

"I can hit it farther on the moon. But actually, my swing is better here on Earth."

"I think about the personal accomplishment, but there's more of a sense of the grand achievement by all the people who could put this man on the moon."

"The first one I hit pretty flush with one hand - went about 200 yards. And the second one I shanked, and it rolled into a crater about 40 yards away."

"We need a continuing presence in space."

"I guess those of us who have been with NASA … kind of understand the tremendous excitement and thrills and celebrations and national pride that went with the Apollo program is just something you're not going to create again, probably until we go to Mars."

"I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It's fragile. That may not be obvious to a lot of folks, and it's tough that people are fighting each other here on Earth instead of trying to get together and live on this planet. We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness of space."

"There were similarities between these two incidents. The similarity was too much success … over-confidence and complacency, quite frankly."

"I know you're all saying I can go to the moon but I can't find Pasadena."

"The military has always been a very introspective organization... One of the reasons why the army is so progressive is its always examining itself. The army is always looking for better ways to do its job."

"If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novels."

"Tom Clancy Treated Like He's Some Kind Of Terrorism Expert"

"Clancy's got a very simple view of the world. Good versus evil. Evil seems to get the upper hand. Good triumphs with vastly superior automatic weapons!"

"Ansara was sprinting up the tunnel, increasing the gap, but Moore was beginning to slow as he heard the thundering boots of men coming down the staircase behind them. He stopped, spun around, and dropped onto his belly as, lit by the flickering light from the tunnel entrance, a figure rushed forward, arm extended. For just a heartbeat Moore glimpsed his assailant's face: the cartel truck's driver. Propped up on his elbows now, Moore fired once into the figure's chest, the round booting him sideways into the panels before he fell onto his back. From behind him came two more men, the rest of the weapons-transfer crew, their Belgian-made cop-killer pistols flashing, the shots booming through the tunnel as one 5.7x28-millimeter round struck the pipe near Moore's elbow."

"I don't discuss works in progress..."

"To truly feel like we're fighting terrorism, we need as much intelligence and infiltration as possible into known rivals of democracy. Once that information is collected, a sincere commitment must be made to thwart their effects through unified/joint military resolve."

"When the first mission of Rainbow Six was actually coming together we really started to realize that we might have a hit on our hands, but hadn't really expected the runaway success."

"I wanted a different way in which to tell my stories. Coming up with concepts for computer games gives me another avenue of creative expression. It's not just me telling the story, it's me designing the idea for a story and letting the players write their own ending."

"I've been telling people for 12 years that if you want to get a nuclear device into the United States, just bring it through the port of Miami disguised as cocaine."

"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else."

"There's nothing that's ever happened in the world that didn't start in one human mind."

"These are our kids... They're good kids... Joining the army or the Marine Corps does not make you into a crypto-alcoholic Nazi, it makes you into a child of America who is doing a job for his country... Those are our kids... They're our kids."

"The army led America in integration... The army recognized early on that, you know, black people are pretty much the same as white people; they just tend to be a little bit darker. They make just as good soldiers."

"If you want to tell me I'm a bum, that's okay."

"Fifteen years ago, there was this country called the Soviet Union that had over 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us... they're not there anymore. That's a good thing. And when people talk about how the world is more dangerous now than it was because we had these terrorists running around, my reply is, you know, a terrorist is like a buzzing mosquito. About 15 years ago, there was a great, big vampire bat; that's several orders of magnitude different from a mosquito. So the world is much safer — a lot safer than it was. It's not perfectly safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than it was."

"The Soviet Union is dead and gone and replaced by the Russian Federation, which is a country we can be friends with now, thank God — and we want the Russians to prosper, and should help the Russians prosper in every way we can within reason."

"The average guy is fairly smart, if you give him the ability to make decisions for himself. That's the whole premise of America, and that's why America has prospered, and it prospers because if the average guy can get information, he can make his own decisions."

"The average guy is smart enough to know the difference between what works and what doesn't, and if you have bad information, sooner or later, you figure it out and you get onto something else."

"Historically, anything that gets information to people is good for the world. The most important human being who ever lived, if you want to leave out religious figures, would be Johannes Gutenberg... that's when the liberation of human thought happened, because people could read the thoughts of people across the world, and have thoughts of their own, and publish them and spread information around. Anything that gets information to people is good. America has prospered because we're the most information-friendly society in the world."