Category Archives: Quotes

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

The poem endured as a favourite among aviators and, more recently, astronauts. Beyond being quoted in numerous books and speeches, it’s also the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Fore and Royal Air Force and must be recited by freshmen at the United States Air Force Academy.

It was written by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American aviator and poet who died during World War II. He was only 19 years old…

Quote by Mark Twain

“I love to revel in philosophical mattersespecially astronomy. I study astronomy more than any other foolishness there is. I am a perfect slave to it. I am at it all the time. I have got more smoked glass than clothes. I am as familiar with the stars as the comets are. I know all the facts and figures and have all the knowledge there is concerning them. I yelp astronomy like a sun-dog, and paw the constellations like Ursa Major.

– Mark Twain (1835-1910), in a letter to the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, 1 August 1869.

“We have your satellite. If you want it back send 20 billion in Martian money. No funny business or you will never see it again.”

– A joke reportedly written on a wall in a hall at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, California, after losing contact with the Mars Polar Lander in December 1999.

Quote by H. G. Wells

“It is conceivable that some great unexpected mass of matter should presently rush upon us out of space, whirl sun and planets aside like dead leaves before the breeze, and collide with and utterly destroy every spark of life upon this earth… It is conceivable, too, that some pestilence may presently appear, some new disease, that will destroy not 10 or 15 or 20 per cent of the earth’s inhabitants as pestilences have done in the past, but 100 per cent, and so end our race… And finally there is the reasonable certainty that this sun of ours must some day radiate itself toward extinction… There surely man must end. That of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing. And yet one doesn’t believe it. At least I do not. And I do not believe in these things because I have come to believe in certain other things–in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the greatness of human destiny. Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can never die again.

– H. G. Wells (1866-1946) in his lecture titled “The Discovery Of The Future” which was originally delivered to the Royal Institution (of Great Britain) in January 1902 before appearing in the trade publication nature and being published in book form.

You can download the full text here (look for the pdf link on the left, right click it and ‘save as’ to desktop if site doesn’t load it correctly).

“There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

– Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1952 – 2001)

“Don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go — and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.”

– Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977) in a 1958 Time Magazine interview

“Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world, knowing they’re going to light the bottom, and doesn’t get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation.”

– John Young (1930), after being asked if he was nervous about making the first Space Shuttle flight in 1981.