Quotes

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. [First words spoken on the moon. The speech as written by his wife read, "That's one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind". Unfortunately, he forgot the a in the between for and man, thus changing the meaning.]

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.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed. [First message to the Earth from the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle after landing on the Moon, 20 July 1969]

Yeah, I wasn't chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn't planned by anyone.

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.

[commenting of the feasibility of a manned mission to Mars] I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo (space program) in 1961.

In my mind, the important thing was that we got four aluminum legs safely down on the surface of the moon while we were still inside the craft. To me, there wasn't a lot of difference between having ten feet of leg between the bottom of the spacecraft in which we were standing and the surface of the moon, and having one inch of neoprene rubber or plastic on the bottom of our boots touching the lunar surface.

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.