For nearly 20 years I have collected a list of my favorite quotes about space. After careful consideration, these are my favorite 50. I hope you enjoy them.
1. We are at a point in history where a proper attention to space, and
especially near space, may be absolutely crucial in bringing the world together.
- Margaret Mead
2. Nothing endures but change. - Heraclitus, about 500 B.C.
3. If I could get one message to you it would be this: the future of this
country and the welfare of the free world depends upon our success in space.
There is no room in this country for any but a fully cooperative, urgently
motivated all-out effort toward space leadership. No one person, no one company,
no one government agency, has a monopoly on the competence, the missions, or the
requirements for the space program. - Lyndon Baines Johnson
4. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, 1892
5. The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known
forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical
machine by which men shall fly along distances through the air, seems to the
writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be. - Simon
Newcomb, 1900
6. Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if
not utterly impossible. - Simon Newcomb, 1902
(eighteen months before Kitty
Hawk.)
7. The aeroplane will never fly. - Lord Haldane, Minister of War, Britain,
1907 (statement made four years after Kitty Hawk.)
8. It is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be
devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind. - Space Act of 1958
9. The 1990s will differ from the 1970s as profoundly as the nineteenth
century from the eighteenth. - Clive Sinclair
10. For I dipped into the Future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision
of the world, and all the wonder that would be. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1842
11. And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and
will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from
sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from
all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature;
they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. -
Winwood Reade, THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN, 1872
12. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. - Dennis
Gabor, 1963
13. I know that some knowledgeable people fear that although we might be
willing to spend a couple of billion dollars in 1958, because we still remember
the humiliation of Sputnik last October, next year we will be so preoccupied by
color television, or new-style cars, or the beginning of another national
election, that we will be unwilling to pay another year's installment on our
space conquest bill. For that to happen well, I'd just as soon we didn't start.
- Hugh L. Dryden
14. Where there is no vision, the people perish. - Proverbs 29:18.
15. A vision must be much more than a project, even a big project. - Robert
S. Walker, FINAL FRONTIER, April 1989.
16. You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a
bonfire under her deck...I have no time for such nonsense. - Napoleon
(commenting on Fulton's Steamship.)
17. It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is
the hope of today and reality of tomorrow. - Robert Goddard
18. The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is
technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological
Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to
control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a
social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is
not appalling to imagine. - C. P. Snow
19. What good is the Moon? You can't buy it or sell it. - Ivan F. Boesky,
Wall Street broker convicted of insider trading (shortly after his release from
prison.)
20. ...the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and
wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved
forward, and so will space. - John F. Kennedy, 1962
21. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this
decade... not because they are easy but because they are hard; - John F.
Kennedy, 1962
22. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may
well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?
Why does Rice play Texas? - John F. Kennedy, 1962
23. Mankind will not remain on Earth forever, but in its quest for light and
space will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and
later will conquer for itself all the space near the Sun. - Konstantin E.
Tsiolkovsky, father of cosmonautics.
24. I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but
to go as far as it was possible to go. - Captain Cook (on his voyage to the
Pacific in Endeavor.)
25. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Albert Einstein
26. When men are arrived at the goal, they should not turn back. - Plutarch
27. Taking a new step...is what people fear most. - Dostoyevski
28. Man's mind and spirit grow with the space in which they are allowed to
operate. - Krafft A. Ehricke, rocket pioneer
29. Freedom lies in being bold. - Robert Frost
30. I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself I appear to have
been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself by now and then
finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean
of truth lay before me all undiscovered. - Sir Isaac Newton's, English
philosopher and physicist, 1727 (his last words.)
31. The Earth is a cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a
cradle. - Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Father of Russian Astronautics, 1896
32. To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the
Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on
its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the
moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the
epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament. - Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky,
Father of Russian Astronautics, 1896
33. It may be said that the development of science in the field of space
flight and related research will be of great significance for the progress of
human culture. - Professor Leonid Sedor, U.S.S.R.
34. There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some
other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have
wings... - Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
35. 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. - Astronaut Virgil I. Grissom (On
January 27, 1967, astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee died from a flash fire
aboard Apollo 204 Spacecraft.)
36. First I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the
goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon... - John F.
Kennedy, May 24, 1961
37. Some day people will travel to Mars. It will be a long trip, but fun.
This will be a big step for mankind. We would be able to find out if there was
life on this planet. It probably will look like a red desert. - J. Stephen
Hartsfield, Seventh Grader, 1984
38. Science-fiction yesterday, fact today- obsolete tomorrow. - Otto O.
Binder, Editor in Chief, SPACE WORLD MAGAZINE
39. The greatest gain from space travel consists in the extension of our
knowledge. In a hundred years this newly won knowledge will pay huge and
unexpected dividends. - Professor Wernher von Braun
40. Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It's not a
thing to be waited for - it is a thing to be achieved. - William Jennings Bryan
41. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first
waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the
first wave of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in
the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be part of it - we mean to
lead it. - John F. Kennedy (at the onset of the lunar landing program.)
42. Now is the time...for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space
achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth. - John
F. Kennedy
43. ...because of what you have done the heavens have become part of man's
world... For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all of the people
on this Earth are truly one. - President Richard M. Nixon (on first lunar
landing.)
44. Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969,
A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND. - Apollo 11 plaque left on Moon.
45. ...the swifter the pace of change, the more lovingly men had to care for
and criticize their institutions to keep them intact through the turbulent
passages. - John Gardner
46. Where there is no vision, the people perish... - Proverbs 29:18
47. Where no counsel is, the people fall; but in the multitude of counsellors
there is safety. - Proberbs 11:14
48. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. - Thoreau
49. New ideas are not only the enemies of old ones; they also appear often in
an extremely unacceptable form. - C.G. Jung
50. I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's. - William Blake
The World Has Four Corners But Space Is Endless. The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. - H.G. Wells, "The Discovery of the Future," 1901
