Top 300 Quotes & Sayings by Buzz Aldrin - Page 4

I don't go through life verbalizing what I feel.

I want people to go into space, to orbit around the world a few times, even to stay there for 24 hours and then come back to where they took off. And I also want people with a low income to be able to do that, not only rich people.

People communicate in Twittering ways. I've learned how to do that.

I shot down two airplanes in Korea, so I wasn't a slouch.

A mind concerned about danger is a clouded mind. It's paralyzing.

When President Kennedy took office, I was in the midst of my education.

During the divorce process, I lived alone and tended to get extremely down on myself.

To me, money is a commodity that a person must have to function, not a goal in itself.

Does it make sense for the U.S. to expend hundreds of billions of dollars to mount a new Apollo-style program to return to the moon? Or have we blazed that trail? Shouldn't we help other nations achieve this goal with their own resources but with our help?

I understand that Detroit was a pretty rough place to grow up in the '70s and '80s.

A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight.

I grew up in New Jersey and never went up the Statue of Liberty.

People come up to me and say, 'It's too bad the space program got canceled.' This is not the case, and yet that is what most of the public thinks has happened.

When we can demonstrate that we can take off horizontally and put something into orbit, then we can begin to talk about increasing the amount of payload. But to say, 'I'm going to do that and put people into orbit' is a real leap.

I don't watch 'American Idol,' but I wouldn't call it 'undignified.'

The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That's behind me now.

Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories.

I think the people who experienced the Apollo missions came away from that experience wondering to themselves, 'When can we get a chance to experience spaceflight?' I've heard that many, many times: that people got into a new career field hoping that they would be able to experience spaceflight.

I am definitely not rich.

America can take man to the moon, and America can take men to Mars - and beyond.

We need to have people up there who can communicate what it feels like, not just pilots and engineers.

The g-forces increased and I wasn't able to continue to hold the camera against the window, so I had to lay it back against my chest, but still continued to photograph the re-entry until there was no more unusual visual effects of the energy in the atmosphere. And it was very comforting to understand that the people in Houston, the controllers, had very high confidence that we were on the right path.

The surface of the moon is like nothing here on Earth! It's totally lacking any evidence of life. It has lots of fine, talcum-powderlike dust mixed with a complete variety of pebbles, rocks, and boulders. Many pebbles, fewer rocks, and even fewer boulders naturally make up its surface. The dust is a very fine, overall dark gray. And with no air molecules to separate the dust, it clings together like cement.

I inherited depression from my mother's side of the family. Her father committed suicide. She committed suicide the year before I went to the moon.

At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. I am the first man to piss his pants on the moon.

This has been far more than three men on a mission to the Moon; more still than the efforts of a government and industry team; more, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown.

My sister called me "Buzzard" when I was a baby - she couldn't say "Brother" so I've been Buzz my whole life.

As we begin to have landings on the moon, we can alternate those with vertical launch of similar crew modules on similar launch vehicles for vertical-launch tourism in space, if you want to call it that adventure travel.

Fear and worry are emotions that cloud the mind from being able to think clearly, to remember what the procedures are to deal with that emergency.

I think the American Dream used to be achieving one's goals in your field of choice-and from that all other things would follow. Now, I think the dream has morphed into the pursuit of money: Accumulate enough of it, and the rest will follow. We've become more materialistic. For balance, I think we need to get back to idealism and patriotism, but also be realistic with our monetary goals.

The urge to explore has propelled evolution since the first water creatures reconnoitered the land. Like all living systems, cultures cannot remain static; they evolve or decline. They explore or expire. . . . Beyond all rationales, space flight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of our modern age.

The feeling of reduced gravity and the limitations of the space suit resulted in a slow-motion movement. Perhaps not too far from a trampoline, but without the springiness and instability.

When we set out to land people on the surface of Mars, I think we should as a nation, as a world, commit ourselves to supporting a growing settlement and colonization there. To visit a few times and then withdraw would be an unforgivable waste of resources.

Unfortunately, pioneers will always pave the way with sacrifices.

Many say exploration is part of our destiny, but it's actually our duty to future generations and their quest to ensure the survival of the human species.

Bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline.

Once you've been first, it cannot be done again. Not by you, not by anyone else.

Exploration is wired into our brains. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what's beyond.

The energy varies with the square of the velocity, so if you need five times the velocity, that's 25 times the energy.

We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown.

They didn’t tell me I was going into space until after they locked the shuttle doors and started counting down.

Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar examined, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked and even blasted. Still to come: Mars being stepped on.

I was given permission to serve myself Communion, with wine and a wafer, on the surface on the Moon. But I was advised not to say anything about it at the time. Someone had strongly objected to the Apollo 8 crew reading from the Bible. We didn't want to get into any further trouble with the religious critics.

Apollo 11 will probably go down in history as one of the major responses of two nations facing each other with threatening technologies - sometimes called mutually assured destruction. It was also the America's response to the apparent superiority of the Russians in putting objects into space before USA could.

When I am getting ready to cross a street, I look both ways before crossing. My bones, my muscles, are not what they used to be, so I am careful when I go up and down stairs, because I've heard stories of older people falling and having very disabling injuries. I have enough things that begin to go a little bit wrong as I get a little bit older.

I believe that space travel will one day become as common as airline travel is today. I'm convinced, however, that the true future of space travel does not lie with government agencies -- NASA is still obsessed with the idea that the primary purpose of the space program is science -- but real progress will come from private companies competing to provide the ultimate adventure ride, and NASA will receive the trickle-down benefits.

It's been one of the greatest challenges that ever came along in my life; it was one of the more difficult things to do.

We should go boldly where man has not gone before. Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith there. A very unusual structure on this potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in seven hours. When people find out about that they're going to say 'Who put that there? Who put that there?' The universe put it there. If you choose, God put it there.

Knowledge of the past and an optimistic view of the present give you great opportunities.

History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.

The final frontier may be human relationships, one person to another.

There are a lot of reasons for not doing something. And if humanity had come up with all the reasons for not doing something we wouldn't have spread across the Earth the way we have. There's a curiosity, and I would submit that that curiosity will put human beings on the surface of Mars.

For every winner, there's a loser. And that person didn't really need to lose. They just didn't understand the game plan.

I think the public needs to be reminded just how much inspiration and intention was given throughout the world to be bold, to send human beings to the moon in the '60s and the '70s. It's important now to bring together the nations that weren't able to do it then and help them do it. We need to move forward.

America must dream again, and have the faith to achieve the dream.

I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.

No dream is too high for those with their eyes in the sky!

The universe is the way it is. It's not going to be changed by supplications.

I expected the unexpected and went [on the Moon] with an open mind. I think the visual scene was described by my words on first landing - "magnificent desolation." Magnificent for the achievement of being there, and desolate for the eons of lifelessness.