Gene Cernan

“When you head on out to the Moon, in very short order, and you get a chance to look back at the Earth, that horizon slowly curves around in upon himself, and all of sudden you're looking at something that is very strange, but yet is very, very familiar, because you're beginning to see the Earth evolve.”

“If you begin to think you're something you're not, you're looking in the wrong mirror.”

“I do believe there is life in outer space. Mathematically, there has to be, and if you believe as I do that there is a creator of the universe, then how can we be so arrogant to believe he created life here and nowhere else?”

“I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership in the world, to explore, to seek knowledge.”

“We leave as we came and, god willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.”

“One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you've seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you're talking about; and then take pictures of them.”

“I'm quite disappointed that I'm still the last man on the moon.”

“As we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

“Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I'm still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.”

“It's our destiny to explore. It's our destiny to be a space-faring nation.”

“If the guidance failed or started to stray or went somewhere we didn't like or the ground didn't like, I could flip a switch, and I could control seven, over seven and a half million pounds of thrust with this handle and fly the thing to the Moon myself.”

“Neil Armstrong was probably one of the most human guys I've ever known in my life.”

“Curiosity is the essence of our existence.”

“I walked on the Moon. What can't you do?”

“People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We're only human beings.”

“Get the shuttle out of the garage. It's in its prime of its life. How could we just put it away?”

“I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill.”

“Am I willing to go to Mars? Yes, but I'm not willing to spend nine months getting there, then wait 18 more months until the planets align to come home.”

“Some of the most exciting space education in the country is not coming out of Washington or New York or California or even Texas. It's coming from a place in Kansas called the Cosmosphere.”

“To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.”