Neil Armstrong Quotes
284 Neil Armstrong Quotes
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[On the role of airpower’s constant pressure in forcing the other side to the peace table] It didn’t cut off the supplies, but I’m sure that harassment had an enormous effect.
Neil Armstrong
I flew into equally difficult places.
Neil Armstrong
[On VF-51 Aviators] If they had that choice, on most days they’d say, ‘I ought to go fly, go face those guns again. I’d rather do that than stay here and read.’ Because they were that kind of people. They enjoyed the flying.
Neil Armstrong
Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.
Neil Armstrong
We had a couple of bruised airplanes, and we made the officials at Nellis [Airport] irritated. The airforce guys got sick and tired of these NASA guys coming and dumping old airplanes on them.
Neil Armstrong
[On being told, ‘It’s dangerous, damn it!’] Yes it is, I know you’re worried, but I have to support it. It’s just darned good training.
Neil Armstrong
As we pan back out to the distance at which we see Earth, it’s Apollo 11 signing off.
Neil Armstrong
[On talking to his Mom after landing] As a matter of fact Mom, we haven’t been permitted to take a bath yet. They did let us wash our faces, but we had to keep the water and the wash cloth to be analysed.
Neil Armstrong
We were not naïve, but we could never have guessed what the volume and intensity of public interest would turn out to be. It certainly was going to be more than anything any of us had experienced before in previous activities of flight. And it was.
Neil Armstrong
My enthusiasm for the future of space travel, I think you’ll grant is understandable. To stand on the surface of the Moon and look at the Earth high overhead leaves an impression not easily forgotten. Although our blue planet is very beautiful, it is very remote and apparently very small. You might suspect in such a situation, the observer might dismiss the Earth as relatively unimportant. However, exactly the opposite conclusion has been reach by each of the individuals who has had the opportunity to share that view. We have all been struck by the similarity to an oasis or island. More importantly, it is the only island that we know is a suitable home for man.
Neil Armstrong
The very success of the human species over eons of time now threatens our extinction. It is the drive that made for success that must now be curbed, redirected or released by expansion into a new world ecology… If we can find people skilful enough to reach the Moon, we sure can find people to solve our environmental problems.
Neil Armstrong
[In February 1972] By using space technology within our lifetime we will have eliminated the calamity of severe storms.
Neil Armstrong
[On being asked if there was ever a moment on the moon when he was ‘just a little spellbound by what was going on’.] About two and a half hours. [The whole time on the moon.]
Neil Armstrong
[When asked about his biggest difficulty on the moon] We had the problems of a five year old boy in a candy store. There were just too many things to do.
Neil Armstrong
[On being asked about his imminent ‘three cities in one day tour’ to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Neil admitted that it was] Certainly the last thing we’ve prepared for.
Neil Armstrong
[On people cheering for them on a parade through the city] They also threw out IBM punch cards. Sometimes they threw a whole stack of punch cards from the eighty-seventh floor of a building and, when they didn’t come apart, it made like a brick. We had a couple of dents in our car from cards that didn’t quite open.
Neil Armstrong
[On addressing a gathering of 15,000 young people] That’s probably the first time we had seen such large aggregations of people… really a lot of people. It was just one event after another, big parades, ending up with the Nixon state dinner in Beverly Hills.
Neil Armstrong
For all mankind.
Neil Armstrong
We are privileged to leave on the Moon a plaque endorsed by you, Mr President [Nixon] saying, ‘For all mankind.’
Neil Armstrong
[On asked about returning to space] I am available to serve in any capacity that they feel I can contribute best… I would certainly hope that my technical abilities are the things that I would use most.
Neil Armstrong
Yet the university’s rules were so cumbersome that I just went completely to half-time. Really it was half-time in name only – what it really amounted to was half pay.
Neil Armstrong
They were dissatisfied with taxation without representation, and we today cry a little bit about both of them… Your town founder, Colonel James Harrod, took much longer to make the trip from Pennsylvania to Kentucky than we did going to the Moon, but I think he spent less money.
Neil Armstrong
Ancient Athens died, but her principles survive. And we ask, ‘Is this the destiny of our nation, or might it just be possible that our nation can survive along with preservation of its principles?’
Neil Armstrong
One of the things that I particularly did with all the simulators was to find out if the designers of the simulator had mechanized the equations of motion properly. So I would always be flying the simulator into areas that most people would not ever go, to make sure that when you got to a discontinuity in an equation, there would not be a mathematical error that would cause the simulator to misbehave. I found a surprising number of times that they were not mechanized properly. That responsibility was natural for me because I had done the same work at Edwards; I was always making sure the equations of motion were properly integrated into the computer.
Neil Armstrong
The guys who were mechanizing the equations – sometimes contractors, sometimes NASA employees – often times did not have the perspective of a pilot. They couldn’t visualize if you were pulling up to a vertical position and then rolling ninety degrees and then pitching forward back toward the ground, what that would mean to the pilot – what they pilot would actually see. Oftentimes they would mechanize the equations without any consideration of what was proper. They would just do the arithmetic without regard to the sense of being proper.
Neil Armstrong
It was positioned so that astronauts were oriented as they would be during launch, laying on their back and facing up against an instrument panel ahead of you. We duplicated the launch profile with various kinds of malfunctions – engines going out and things – and depending on what went wrong, you had to have a procedure for either continuing or aborting, or in some cases ejecting, whatever the case may be. That was a very good simulator. It did not have the g-force on you, but we were able to tilt the seat back so that it would give the impression of g changing at least in the sense of getting a feeling for the direction that the acceleration was taking. That was a very useful simulator.
Neil Armstrong
I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.
Neil Armstrong
It’s hard to compare against combat when a big shell from an aircraft just misses you. That’s close too, but the LLRV accident was indeed one of the close ones.
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
We really needed that time to be able to do all of the debriefings and talk to all the various systems guys. The subsequent Apollo crews were very interested in this question and that question that had to do with their own mission planning – what they thought they might reasonably do and whether we had ideas on how they might improve their own flights. Mostly, the discussion revolved around what was doable on the surface, because that affected the planning substantially. So that time was very valuable to us personally, as well as to everyone else. Of course, we would have liked to have been with our families, and we were prevented from that. But we knew they were not far away. All the uncertainty was gone now.
Neil Armstrong
They would run one roll of film, and as soon as that was ready, they would get copies of them to us. As we went through the pictures themselves, a lot of questions also came up that other flight crews were interested in having answers to. The photos helped them ask their questions and helped us answer them.
Neil Armstrong
Hopefully the trips we will be making in the next couple of decades will open up our eyes a little. When you are looking at the Earth from the lunar distance, its atmosphere is just unobservable. The atmosphere is so thin, and such a minute part of the Earth, that it can’t be sensed at all. That should impress everyone. The atmosphere of the Earth is a small and valuable resource. We’ve going to have to learn how to conserve it and use it wisely. Down here in the crowd you are ware of the atmosphere and it seems adequate, so you don’t worry about it too much. But from a different vantage point, perhaps it is possible to understand more easily why we should be worrying.
Neil Armstrong
We were very privileged to leave on the Moon a plaque endorsed by you Mr President, saying ‘For all Mankind.’ Perhaps in the third millennium a wayward stranger will read the plaque at Tranquility Base. We’ll let history mark that this was the age in which that became a fact. I was struck this morning in New York by a proudly waved but uncarefully scribbled sign. It said: ‘Through you, we touched the Moon.’ It was our privilege today to touch America. I suspect that perhaps the most warm, genuine feeling that all of us could receive came through the cheers and shouts and, most of all, the smiles of our fellow Americans.
Neil Armstrong
We hope and think that those people shared our belief that this is the beginning of a new era – the beginning of an era when man understands the universe around him, and the beginning of the era when man understands himself.
Neil Armstrong
I was not a believer in the big final test – a one shotter. I wasn’t taught that way at Purdue. In the real world, though, you do have to face big final tests from time to time, and there’s always a chance that if you have an off day at the wrong time it can really penalize you badly.
Neil Armstrong
I really couldn’t work the system. I had determined not to take any work from NASA; I wouldn’t make proposals to them because I thought it might be viewed as taking advantage of my past association, which I wouldn’t do. In retrospect, I was probably wrong about that. I probably should have been active, because I would have known exactly where to go to get some satisfying research projects done. It would have been easier in terms of funding sources had I taken that route.
Neil Armstrong
It was burdened with lots of rules. In order to escape being bound to the rules of the faculty of collective bargaining group, it was required that I be less than full-time. So a strategy some of us tried was going to half-time teaching and half-time in a research institute.
Neil Armstrong
[On collective bargaining, I] wanted to be valued on my own merits, not on some group’s merits. Because I was involved by this time in professional societies, projects of various kinds, sometimes speaking engagements, I was looking for a way to legally circumvent this envelope of instructions that had been thrown over the top of us.
Neil Armstrong
Establishing the institute was not something that had been high on my priority list. It was just kind of a necessary evil. Once getting into the work, though, I did find some of it very interesting and tried to actively participate in it.
Neil Armstrong
I could not expect the volume of requests coming my way to subside – some of which were good opportunities with good people and quality institutions. I realized that, in my situation, I couldn’t remain in that kind of job. On the other hand, taking board of directors’ positions provided a livelihood without obliging myself to spend all of my time with any one of them.
Neil Armstrong
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