Neil Armstrong Quotes
284 Neil Armstrong Quotes
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One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Neil Armstrong
I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket-protector nerdy engineer – born under the law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-flow dynamics, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.
Neil Armstrong
A picture does a great job, but it's not nearly like being there.
Neil Armstrong
As I stepped on the moon, I looked around, dazed…magnificent. The vast, sandy silver surface was almost illusory.
Neil Armstrong
I think if there was anything I learned from our skipper was that it's not how you look; it's how you perform.
Neil Armstrong
It was the lowest-paying job that I was offered coming out of college, but I think, in retrospect, it was the right one.
Neil Armstrong
[At 71 years of age] I'm still a legal pilot and I still enjoy it as much as I always did…
Neil Armstrong
Start at the end and work back.
Neil Armstrong
[On the LLRV, lunar landing research vehicle] It looked like a tin Campbell Soup can sitting on top of some legs, with a gimbaled engine underneath it.
Neil Armstrong
The future is not something I know a great deal about. But I did live in Washington for a time and learned that lack of knowledge about a subject is no impediment to talking about it.
Neil Armstrong
Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.
Neil Armstrong
[On whether he would like to see us go to Mars and whether it was possible in 2001] Yes. I think it's doable now, but very expensive and probably not within reasonable expectation of being able to be budgeted in the near future…. I guess the great hope is that we have a breakthrough someplace that would make that problem much less awesome than it appears at this point. ….. I hope.
Neil Armstrong
[On being asked if he ever hoped to go back into space at age 71] If they offered me command of a Mars mission, I'd jump at it.
Neil Armstrong
Machines are getting better and better, but fortunately, there's still a place for us homo sapiens, some reason for us to continue to exist.
Neil Armstrong
I began to focus on aviation probably at age eight or nine, and inspired by what I'd read and seen about aviation and building model aircraft, why, I determined at an early age—and I don't know exactly what age, while I was still in elementary school—that that was the field I wanted to go into, although my intention was to be—or hope was to be an aircraft designer. I later went into piloting because I thought a good designer ought to know the operational aspects of an airplane.
Neil Armstrong
John Crites. I remember him very well, because he was sort of an unconventional teacher. He allowed a few students in each of his classes to do special projects, and so we didn't go to class very much. We were always off working on our projects.
Neil Armstrong
My knowledge of aerodynamics was not good enough to match the quality of the Wright Brothers' tunnel, and at that point I suppose I was equally educated to them. But it was a fun project. Blew out a lot of fuses in my home.
Neil Armstrong
I was an avid reader, yes, and I read all kinds of things. I spent a lot of time in the library and took a lot of books out of the library, both fiction and nonfiction. However, when I was building things, like models and so on, they were predominantly focused on aviation-related “stuff.”
Neil Armstrong
I read a lot of the aviation magazines of the time, Flight and Air Trails and Model Airplane News, and anything I could get my hands on.
Neil Armstrong
As a young boy I don't recall reading much science fiction. I did come to enjoy it when I was perhaps late high school and college age.
Neil Armstrong
A seven-year program, yes. Two years of [university study], then go to the navy, go through flight training, get a commission, and then serve in the regular navy for a total then of three years of active duty, after which the plan would be to return to university and finish the last two years.
Neil Armstrong
[On How did the navy go about training you?] Well, they found that the way I had learned to fly before wasn't nearly what they expected.
Neil Armstrong
I believe you could get it in a glider at age fourteen, but in a powered aircraft you had to wait till you reached your sixteenth birthday, and then the license you got was called a student pilot's license, which allowed you to fly solo, but not take passengers with you.
Neil Armstrong
[On his first solo flight] A very exciting time when you go on your first solo.
Neil Armstrong
[On whether it was unusual to learn to fly at such an early age] I was in a class of maybe about seventy students, about half boys. We had three in my class that learned to fly at the same time I did. So I don't know how unusual that is, three out of thirty five, 10 percent. Not very unusual.
Neil Armstrong
I moved a lot before I entered school, and when I entered school, the rate of change of towns slowed down somewhat, but still about every couple of years it seemed like we were moving.
Neil Armstrong
[On how to dead reckon in different words] Guessing. At least you'd hopefully be in the right direction, probably weren't always.
Neil Armstrong
The fighter pilots always said that only the very best men got to be fighter pilots. My own guess is that a large part of it had to do with what needs they had at the time you graduated, because in my particular class, most of my classmates happened to get what they asked for, while I can recall people from a different generation saying nobody got what they asked for.
Neil Armstrong
I happened to be a day fighter pilot. We had night fighter pilots on the ship I was on, and I thought they were crazy.
Neil Armstrong
All my landings on a carrier were in day. I was always happy about that.
Neil Armstrong
I was very young, very green.
Neil Armstrong
I would not have enjoyed trying to go - well, I probably would have enjoyed it, but I don't know that I would have won against a MiG in an old Panther. It was a pretty primitive airplane. Of course, the MiG was pretty primitive too, but had a little better performance.
Neil Armstrong
I don't know to what extent that antiaircraft fire played a part in it, but I actually ran through a cable, an antiaircraft cable, and knocked off about six or eight feet of my right wing. If you're going fast, a cable will make a very good knife.
Neil Armstrong
I ejected. The old-style shotgun-shell-powered ejection seat, 22 G seat.
Neil Armstrong
Yes, we had a lot of bullet holes in our airplanes when we brought them back. We'd patch them up. [With duct tape and paint]
Neil Armstrong
[His peers at Apollo] They've forgiven me for my errors.
Neil Armstrong
They put girls in the movie, which I didn't remember from my experience.
Neil Armstrong
The naval aviators that I knew, first: were determined to do a first-class job. Second, most of them really enjoyed the combat experience in many ways. They'd rather be flying than not be flying. Lastly, they questioned everything.
Neil Armstrong
[On the Korean War] You're very much involved in the experience and questioning it is part of the natural things to do.
Neil Armstrong
I was twenty-two. I was really getting old. When I went back to university, kids looked so young.
Neil Armstrong
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