“For my confirmation, I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.”

The logistic requirements for a large, elaborate mission to Mars are no greater that those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theatre of war.

It is in scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life and man in the science classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.

There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program – your tax-dollar will go further.

The same forces of nature which enable us to fly to the stars, enable us also to destroy our star.

Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month.

To simply dismiss the concept of God as being unscientific is to violate the very objectivity of science itself.

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.

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

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.

A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.

The winner is the chef who takes the same ingredients as everyone else and produces the best results.

Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature.

There are men who teach best by not teaching at all.

It may have been in pieces, but I gave you the best of me.

And I myself a Catholic will be, So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee. Hail, Bard triumphant! and some care bestow On us, the Poets militant below.

The defects of human nature afford us opportunities of exercising our philosophy, the best employment of our virtues. If all men were righteous, all hearts true and frank and loyal, what use would our virtues be?

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.