If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed in the spacecraft cabin.

To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage, single-handed, in an unprecedented duel with nature—could one dream of anything more?

We want to explore. We’re curious people. Look back over history, people have put their lives at stake to go out and explore … We believe in what we’re doing. Now it’s time to go.

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.

Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.

Failure is not an option.

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

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

As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

To go places and do things that have never been done before – that’s what living is all about.

The sky is the limit only for those who aren't afraid to fly!

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.