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"You've done it in the simulator so many times, you don't have a real sense of being excited when the flight is going on. You're excited before, but as soon as the liftoff occurs, you are busy doing what you have to do."
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"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."
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Personal Development
"He not busy being born is busy dying."
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Personal Development
"Initiative is doing the right thing without being told."
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Personal Development
"Being is more important than doing."
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Personal Development
"Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent."
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Personal Development
"Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light."
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Personal Development
"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions."
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Personal Development
"You cannot be a hero without being a coward."
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Personal Development
"The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages."
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Personal Development
"I loved being in Close Encounters, just to watch Steven Spielberg working was exciting."
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"The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that."
Attitude
"I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student."
Science
"You have to be there not for the fame and glory and recognition and being a page in a history book, but you have to be there because you believe your talent and ability can be applied effectively to operation of the spacecraft."
History
"I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don't remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote."
Preparation
"I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on."
Family
"We wanted to be in great shape, we wanted to be able to cope with zero gravity, we wanted to be able to cope with accelerations and decelerations and so on. So all of us trained so that we were probably in the best physical condition we had ever been in up until that point."
Preparation
"Of course I was delighted the flight was over, but I still had to worry about cleaning up inside the cabin, I had to worry about the hatch, how to get in the sling, and so on."
Worry
"I'd like to say I was smart enough to finish six grades in five years, but I think perhaps the teacher was just glad to get rid of me."
Education
"I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds."
Success
"Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business."
Business
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