Neil Armstrong Quotations

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.

This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

I can honestly say - and it's a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

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.

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

It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It's an interesting place to be. I recommend it.

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

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that's when something snaps up and bites you.

I guess we all like to be recognized not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily work.

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

I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Gliders, sail planes, they're wonderful flying machines. It's the closest you can come to being a bird.

I'm substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They're sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they're hitting back and forth.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.

As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember.

I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.

We had hundreds of thousands of people all dedicated to doing the perfect job, and I think they did about as well as anyone could ever have expected.

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It's sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.

I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer.

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

I was elated, ecstatic and extremely surprised that we were successful.

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

The one thing I regret was that my work required an enormous amount of my time, and a lot of travel.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

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.

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

If that's there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

I was delighted to be in that project ... but I don't think about it on a day-to-day basis -- probably only when you guys (in the media) remind me.

I was the strange creature that kidnapped Bock from his homeland and brought him to this strange new and still changing planet. I can't help feeling that I owe him an apology or at least an explanation.

We would have loved the opportunity to take some time to enjoy it, but we had the inevitable checklist and experiments that had to go on. So it was back to business, back to work as soon as we congratulated each other.

Between 7am and 8.30am on Tuesday 8 March, all of our broadband customers lost internet connectivity as a result of planned maintenance on our network over-running from its intended 4am to 6am window.

If there are any going, I will certainly be looking to take them.

Despite being competitors, the Wrights held great respect for Langley,

It will certainly be 20 years or more before that happens,

It will be expensive, it will take a lot of energy and a complex spacecraft. But I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo (space program) in 1961.

I guess that's the story of flight in the 20th century: from the beginning, the very first flights at Kitty Hawk to the various, very furthest and fastest flights that man has ever made,

For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

Shoot for the stars but if you happen to miss shoot for the moon instead.

Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!

The single observation I would offer for your consideration is that some things are beyond your control. You can lose your health to illness or accident. You can lose your wealth to all manner of unpredictable sources. What are not easily stolen from you without your cooperation are your principles and your values. They are your most important possessions and, if carefully selected and nurtured, will well serve you and your fellow man.

In flying, the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.

I believe that the message of Apollo XI was that in the spirit of Apollo, a free and open spirit, you can attack a very difficult goal and achieve it, if you can all agree and work together to achieve that goal.

I tell you, we're going to be busy for a minute.

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.

I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street.

You've got to expect things are going to go wrong. And we always need to prepare ourselves for handling the unexpected.

We have no proof, But if we extrapolate, based on the best information we have available to us, we have to come to the conclusion that ... other life probably exists out there and perhaps in many places...

I like the aspect of technology. For me to spin the way I do, I would have to carry five crates of records with me everywhere I go, which in this day and age would be like two hundred extra dollars in baggage fees. All I need now is a hard drive and a computer and I can rock anywhere in the world.

Research is creating new knowledge.

We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.

It's a great thing for a man to walk on the moon. But it's a greater thing for God to walk on the earth.

Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.

The exciting part for me, as a pilot, was the landing on the moon. That was the time that we had achieved the national goal of putting Americans on the moon. The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable. So the feeling of elation accompanied the landing rather than the walking.

The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.

It's different, but it's very pretty out here. I suppose they are going to make a big deal of all this.

Every flying machine has its own unique characteristics, some good, some not so good. Pilots naturally fly the craft in such a manner as to take advantage of its good characteristics and avoid the areas where it is not so good.

I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

Through books you will meet poets and novelists whose creations will fire your imagination. You will meet the great thinkers who will share with you their philosophies, their concepts of the world, of humanity and of creation. You will learn about events that have shaped our history, of deeds both noble and ignoble. All of this knowledge is yours for the taking… Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.

Damn I really did it. I blew the first words on the moon, didn't I?

I hope you become comfortable with the use of logic without being deceived into concluding that logic will inevitably lead you to the correct conclusion.

Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase. The autotargeting was taking us right into a ... crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks ... and it required ... flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area.

When you deejay a party, a good DJ's job is to take care of the crowd. If people want to hear Britney Spears, that's what you're supposed to do.

I am comfortable with my level of public discourse.

Start at the end and work back.

Space has not changed but technology has, in many cases, improved dramatically. A good example is digital technology where today's cell phones are far more powerful than the computers on the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module that we used to navigate to the moon and operate all the spacecraft control systems.

There are places to go beyond belief,

Now and then I miss the excitement about being in the cockpit of an airplane and doing new things.

I think if there was anything I learned from our skipper was that it's not how you look; it's how you perform.

Ever since I was a little boy, I dreamed I would do something important in aviation.

Opportunities will be available to you that you cannot imagine.

The view of the moon that we've been having recently is really spectacular. It fills about three-quarters of the hatch window, and of course we can see the entire circumference even though part of it is in complete shadow and part of it is in earthshine. It's a view worth the price of the trip.

It's a strange, eerie sensation to fly a lunar landing trajectory not difficult, but somewhat complex and unforgiving.

Fear is not an unknown emotion to us.

No matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would be generally the same.

The [Moon] surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.

This blowing dust became increasingly thicker. It was very much like landing in a fast moving ground fog.

Man must understand his universe in order to understand his destiny.

There are two of them up here.

As I stepped on the moon, I looked around, dazed...magnifice nt. The vast, sandy silver surface was almost illusory.

He did it alone. We had a cast of a million.

I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo [space program] in 1961.

Perhaps it won't matter, in the end, which country is the sower of the seed of exploration. The importance will be in the growth of the new plant of progress and in the fruits it will bear. These fruits will be a new breed of the human species, a human with new views, new vigor, new resiliency, and a new view of the human purpose. The plant: the tree of human destiny.

A picture does a great job, but it's not nearly like being there.

It doesn't sound like there was time for the word to be there. On the other hand, I didn't intentionally make an inane statement... certainly the 'a' was intended, because that's the only way the statement makes any sense.

The single thing which makes any man happiest is the realization that he has worked up to the limits of his ability, his capacity. It's all the better, of course, if this work has made a contribution to knowledge, or toward moving the human race a little farther forward.

How we use the knowledge we gain determines our progress on earth, in space or on the moon. Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.

History will remember the twentieth century for two technological developments: atomic energy and space flight.

I have been in relatively high-risk businesses all of my adult life. Few of the others, however, had the possibility of direct gains in knowledge which this one had. I have confidence in the equipment, the planning, the training. I suspect that on a risk-gain ratio, this project would compare very, very favorably with those to which I've been accustomed on the past 20 years.

Society’s future will depend on a continuous improvement program for the human character. And what will that future bring? I do not know, but it will be exciting.

People love conspiracy theories.

The Eagle has landed.

Hey, we missed the whole thing.

There are people I'll always love to listen to, and I'm always ending up discovering new songs by them, which is crazy. Like Stevie Wonder.

Technology makes good DJ's better, but also allows your average person to think they're a DJ, and unfortunately there's no checks and balances about people making it a career.

I guess because deejaying has become my job, I tend to listen to really horrible stuff on my spare time. If you heard my iPod you'd be like, "what the hell?"

It never hurts to have friends around, so that's why you'd form a crew.