Assorted Quotations

This page features a collection of interesting and relevant quotations by authors and scholars on topics ranging from the Enlightenment, Copernican Revolution, NASA, Science, Philosophy, and Flat Earth.

NASA

  “ As for walking on the moon, sometimes I wonder if that really happened. I can honestly say—and it's a great surprise to me that I have never had a dream about being on the moon. It's a great disappointment to me. ”
                  —Neil Armstrong (Wagener, One Giant Leap, p. 303).

  “ Today we have with us a group of students, among America's best. To you we say we have only completed a beginning. We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of the truth's protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief... ”
                  —Neil Armstrong

  “ A beautiful story. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we went to the Moon because we’re pioneers or explorers or selfless discovers. We went to the Moon because Cold War politics made it the militarily expedient thing to do. ”
                  —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space chronicles: facing the ultimate frontier (2012), p.200

  “ Notwithstanding the sanitized memories so many of us have of the Apollo era, Americans were not first on the Moon because we're explorers by nature or because our country is committed to the pursuit of knowledge. We get to the Moon first because the United States was out to beat the Soviet Union, to win the Cold War any way we could. Kennedy made that clear when he complained to top NASA officials in November 1962:

I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good, I think we ought to know about it, we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it in my opinion to do it in this time or fashion is because we hope to beat [the Soviet Union] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds.

In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. ”
                  —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space chronicles: facing the ultimate frontier (2012), p.219

  “ In the late 1960s our simulation technology had progressed to the point where it became virtually impossible to separate the training from actual missions. The simulations became full dress rehearsals tor the missions down to the smallest detail. The simulation tested out the crew's and controller's responses to normal and emergency conditions. It checked out the exact flight plan, mission rules, and procedures that the crew and controllers would use tor a later flight. ”
                  —Apollo Flight Director Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option

  “ The simulations were so real that no controller could discern the difference between the training and the real mission. ”
                  —Apollo Flight Director Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option

  “ So when George “Jay” Keyworth, a forty-three-year-old weapons designer from Los Alamos, became Ronald Reagan’s science adviser, NASA faced a crisis of survival. He did not trust the space agency. “Of all the organizations that I have dealt with, some so wrapped up in their bureaucratic interests that they were certainly counter to the directions . . . the country was going in. Some of them filled with incompetent people. Some of them outstanding. I have only seen one that lied. It was NASA. From the top to the bottom they lie. . . . The reason they lie, of course, is because they are wrapped up in a higher calling. In their eyes they are white lies. They tell lies in order to do what has to be done. Because in the end the result will be for the betterment of the public. So they are not lying from evil. But, nevertheless, they are lying,” Keyworth asserts.¹³ He believed that the entire basis of the shuttle was a lie. ”
                  —Joseph J. Trento, Perscription for disaster, p.184

  “ All government agencies lie part of the time, but NASA is the only one I've ever encountered that does so routinely. ”
                  —George A. Keyworth, Science Advisor to President Regan in testimony before Congress, March 14, 1985

  “ Of all the organizations that I have dealt with . . . I have only seen one that lied. It was NASA," science adviser Keyworth says today. "The reason they lie, of course, is because they are wrapped up in a higher calling. In their eyes these are white lies. They tell lies in order to do what has to be done. Because in the end the result will be for the betterment of the public. So they are not lying from evil. But, nevertheless, they are lying. ”
                  —George A. Keyworth, quoted by the LA Times, Jan 18 1987

  “ As the team and the money began to grow, Webb got a message from Bernard A. Schriever, who was responsible for all Air Force ICBMS including the troubled Atlas. Then Seamans’ aide David Williamson recalls what happened. “There is a famous secret telegram dealing with all of it and it was sent to James Webb saying don’t make it [NASA’s Atlas tests] public, because if you fly a big public mission on my Atlas and my Atlas breaks, I won’t be able to lie to Congress and to the people of America about how far ahead of the Russians we are. That’s not what he said but that’s what he meant. What he said was that it will hurt national security because it will give the Soviets a feeling that our deterrent isn’t credible. Okay, well that’s a legitimate argument. In fact it [the Atlas] wasn’t credible and wasn’t going to be credible for about three years. What he was saying in a premature way, we [NASA] will tell everybody in the world that we’re not as good as we think. And that is one of the big differences between the old NASA and DOD [Department of Defense] throughout. We never thought to use secrecy for embarrassment reasons of that kind.” ” ”
                  —Joseph J. Trento, Perscription for disaster, p.40