Neil Armstrong Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

Neil Armstrong
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am in the position of a pilot without his checklist, so I'll have to wing it a bit. … [Prior to the Apollo missions,] no one knew what kind of person could be persuaded to take the trip. Prisoners were suggested. Soldiers could be ordered. Photographers could take pictures — and they're expendable. Doctors understood the limits of human physiology. Finally, both sides picked pilots.

Neil Armstrong
All the Apollo people were working hard, working long hours, and were dedicated to making certain everything they did, they were doing to the very best of their ability.

Neil Armstrong
Our autopilot was taking us into a verge large crater, about the size of a big football stadium with steep slopes on the crater covered with very large rocks about the size of automobiles that was not the kind of place that I wanted to try to make the first landing.

Neil Armstrong
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.

Neil Armstrong
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.

Neil Armstrong
Science fiction writers thought it would be possible. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other authors found ways to get people to the moon. But none of those writers foresaw any possibility of the lunar explorers being able to communicate with Earth, transmit data, position information, or transmit moving pictures of what they saw back to Earth. The authors foresaw my part of the adventure, but your part was beyond their comprehension.

Neil Armstrong
Preflight planners wanted us to stay in TV range so that they could learn from our results how they could best plan for future missions. I candidly admit that I knowingly and deliberately left the planned working area out of TV coverage to examine and photograph the interior crater walls for possible bedrock exposure or other useful information.

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

Neil Armstrong
During my testimony (to the House Science and Technology Committee) in May I said, Some question why Americans should return to the Moon. After all, they say we have already been there. I find that mystifying. It would be as if 16th century monarchs proclaimed that we need not go to the New World, we have already been there. Or as if President Thomas Jefferson announced in 1803 that Americans need not go west of the Mississippi, the Lewis and Clark Expedition has already been there. Americans have visited and examined 6 locations on Luna, varying in size from a suburban lot to a small township. That leaves more than 14 million square miles yet to explore.

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

Neil Armstrong
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.

Neil Armstrong
Friends and colleagues all of a sudden looked at us, treated us, slightly differently than had months or years before when we were working together. I never quite understood that.

Neil Armstrong
The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on Earth.

Neil Armstrong
I thought, well. when I step off it's just going to be a little step—a step from there down to there—but then I thought about all those 400,000 people who had given me the opportunity to make that step and thought it's going to be a big something for all those folks and, indeed for a lot of others that weren't even involved in the project, so it was kind of a simple correlation.

Neil Armstrong
A century hence, 2000 may be viewed as quite a primitive period in human history. It's something to hope for. … I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer — born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow. As an engineer, I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession.

Neil Armstrong
I'll not assert that it was a diversion which prevented a war, but nevertheless, it was a diversion.

Neil Armstrong
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.

Neil Armstrong
Later Apollo flights were able to do more and move further in order to cover larger areas, particularly when the Lunar Rover vehicle became available in 1971.

Neil Armstrong
We were involved in doing what many thought to be impossible, putting humans on Earth's moon.

Neil Armstrong