Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Never wait for trouble.
All that I am ... I owe to the Air Force.
Roger. We've got you, we're go on that alarm.
There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.
It was a texture. The blackness was so intense.
The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.
At the moment of truth, there are either reasons or results.
Roger, we copy. It was beautiful from here, Tranquility. Over.
Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.
When I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.
Everybody that I've ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.
My walk on the moon lasted three days. My walk with God will last forever.
Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.
The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.
Hey Ridley, that Machometer is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me.
In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.
We've been to the Moon nine times. Why would we fake it nine times, if we faked it?
You wouldn't want to land on the Moon and launch to Mars. That would be very inefficient.
It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.
If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.
I'm proud to be an American, I'll tell you. What a program and what a place and what an experience.
After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, "Man, you made a big mistake."
Roger, Tranquility. Be advised there are lots of smiling faces in this room and all over the world. Over.
It's really difficult for fanatic churchgoers to understand God can't help me. I'm the only one who can help me.
It certainly is possible to construct a moon base in such a way that crews could stay for extended periods of time.
What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.
If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.
You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.
Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.
You concentrate on what you are doing, to do the best job you can, to stay out of a serious situation. That’s the way the X-1 was.
You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.
I have no regrets about my life. People ask, "If you had to do it all over again, would you do it differently?" No. That's speculation.
I don't think about life everlasting. If something doesn't have scientific evidence to back it up, I don't believe it. I'm a straight shooter.
The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose. It's duty.
I think the future of lunar bases has to be somewhere around the South or North Pole. You have less variation in temperature and more daylight hours.
Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always a high priority in whatever I was doing.
I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.
Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.
I always respected Neil Armstrong highly. He was probably the coolest under pressure of anyone I ever had the privilege of flying with. I never saw him flustered.
Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.
Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.
There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.
Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.
That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.
I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.
Buzz Aldrin doesn't think we need to go back to the Moon - that we should go straight on to Mars. I'm more on the side that says we should go back to the Moon. I think there's a lot we can utilise the Moon for scientifically.
The Moon was the most spectacularly beautiful desert you could ever imagine. Unspoilt. Untouched. It had a vibrancy about it and the contrast between it and the black sky was so vivid, it just made this impression of excitement and wonder.
I think a Moon base is not necessary to get to Mars, but I think it will be helpful. It would give you a chance to develop and mature some systems; long duration, deep space stuff; and you're close enough to get some help, via radio from Earth.
I was able to look out the window to see this incredible sight of the whole circle of the Earth. Oceans were crystal blue, the land was brown, and the clouds and the snow were pure white. And that jewel of Earth was just hung up in the blackness of space.
It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.