top of page
"I never made a career decision based solely on my desire to be an astronaut. I attended the Naval Academy because I wanted to be a Navy pilot. I majored in math because math had always come pretty easily to me and I liked it."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Decision-Making quotes

"There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either."

"It is only in our decisions that we are important."

"You must not make hasty decisions because they make you do what you would not have done normally."

"One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don't show (because it's difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice."

"It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good."

"See that the President, the Cabinet and staff are informed. If cut out of the information flow, their decisions may be poor, not made, or not confidently or persuasively implemented."

"In difficult moments it's sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can't, move on to the second best thing."

"The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years."

"Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision."
Explore more quotes by John L. Phillips

"My dad served in two wars has been flying airplanes for 60 years now. He was certainly quite an inspiration."

"A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression."

"After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't."

"We're going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that's part of my job. I don't mind being a human guinea pig."

"Even with only two people on board, where maintenance is a large piece of our working day, we still have time to do scientific research. We have to be ready to support those Shuttle visits in a lot of different ways."

"It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut."

"If I wasn't doing this kind of exploration, I'd like to be doing some other kind of exploration. It might be more risky, or less risky, but, in the business of exploration, risk is part of the territory."

"In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn't mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and I consider it the same in space exploration."

"Every day, we get a little bit closer to the kind of expertise and the kind of experience we're going to need to go there. I'd love to be the guy walking on Mars."

"The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle."
bottom of page