“It was very successful, but it fell on the wrong planet.”

Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn’t.

Don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go – and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

Looking back, nothing seems so simple than a utopian vision realised.

I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.

I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.

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.

If we were to start today on an organized and well-supported space program I believe a practical passenger rocket can be built and tested within ten years.

I’m convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.

I believe that the time has arrived for medical investigation of the problems of manned rocket flight, for it will not be the engineering problems but rather the limits of the human frame that will make the final decision as to whether manned space flight will eventually become a reality.

With our present knowledge, we can respond to the challenge of stellar space flight solely with intellectual concepts and purely hypothetical analysis. Hardware solutions are still entirely beyond our reach and far, far away.

My friends they were dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the Earth. They were dancing again when the first Americans landed on the Moon. I’d like to ask you, don’t hang up your dancing slippers.

I only hope that we shall not wait to adopt the program until after our astronomers have reported a new and unsuspected asteroid moving across their fields of vision with menacing speed. At that point it will be too late!

One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions.

By the year 2000 we will undoubtedly have a sizable operation on the Moon, we will have achieved a manned Mars landing and it’s entirely possible we will have flown with men to the outer planets.

Everybody’s human. You are only on this planet for a little bit of time.

If you stay in your heart you will always be inspired and if you are inspired you will always be enthusiastic. There is nothing more contagious on this planet as enthusiasm.

We are here because there are things that need our help. Like the planet. Like each other. Like animals. The world is like a garden, and we are its protectors.

There is nothing more contagious on this planet than enthusiasm.

Sometimes I feel like I’m actually on the wrong planet. It’s great when I’m in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?

I confess, I do have to remind myself almost daily that there are people on this earth capable of reading, writing, eating and dressing themselves who believe their lives are ruled from billions of miles away, by the stars – and, of course, the planets.

Perhaps there could be no joy on this planet without an equal weight of pain to balance it out on some unknown scale.

My first language, the true language of the soul spoken only on our planet of origin, had no word for betrayal or traitor. Or even loyalty- because without the opposite, the concept had no meaning.