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Quotes by Astronaut

"The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited."

"Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit."

"We also had to bring with us some desired scientific equipment over to the station as well as assemble new machines. For that, I had to conduct two space walks."

"I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom."

"Once you've been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is."

"It's a great view from here. I'm having the time of my life."

"Science was something that really caught my attention. It was something I really could sink my teeth into."

"This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century."

"I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine."

"I consider myself to be very fortunate in my career, my timing has worked out."

"I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises."

"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."

"I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us."

"When you launch in a rocket, you're not really flying that rocket. You're just sort of hanging on."

"I saw the booster, not Sputnik, flying by, and I said, maybe this is the way we should be going, not just sitting back waiting for something to happen."

"As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don't know what they're saying."

"The last thing, and the only one that you cannot physically train for, is the psychological preparation."

"Yeah, I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn't planned by anyone."

"Kennedy had made a mess in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had to do something to look good. The Apollo program of going to the Moon was quite a goal,."

"Polytechnique is a school whose multidisciplinary, very high scientific level curriculum is invaluable."

"The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing."

"I don't know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets."

"So, I decided that whatever I was, wanted to do with my life, it would have to do, it would have to have something to do with the exploration and doing new things."

"Russia is still the leader in world space exploration. But its position of leader involves great responsibility - we have no right to lag behind. We can and we must move constantly forward."

"When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system."

"Those folks out in the space suits are going to be getting beat up."

"I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts."

"And the first flight of the tether satellite happened in '92, and I was the backup on that flight."

"We still have a lot of international partner modules that need to get up there to make it truly the international structure that it will be, and that's highly important; we need to get to where the crew size is bigger."
Will,

"I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did."
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