Jonathan Winters Quotes

There's a historical milestone in the fact that our Apollo 11 landing on the moon took place a mere 66 years after the Wright Brothers' first flight.

If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers.

Walking on the moon is now something that people used to do, in the distant past, like macramé, decoupage and the Hustle.... There will just be the pictures, then, as we saw them in the summer of '69, ghostly and blurry, colorless and incomprehensible, an infant's glimpse of a new world.

Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who dealt in metaphors.

Space fascinated me because I'm from the generation that saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon live on TV. I was 7 at the time. Also, 'Lost in Space' was one of my favorite shows on TV back then.

If the Wright Brothers were alive today, Orville would have to lay off Wilbur.

Some of the greatest reality television we ever had was the moon landings. When you think about it, that was human emotion and people, unscripted, working with each other - and millions and millions of people around the world, glued to their television sets to share real-time in a brand new, fascinating human experience.

The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.

As a card-carrying space nerd and NASA's chief scientist, I love space movies, from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to my all-time favorite - 'The Dish', an Australian comedy that celebrates that first moment when Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of our moon.

If you go back to the early days of aviation, the guys designing it built it, and then they got in it and flew it. I mean, who does that anymore?

Neil Armstrong was no Christopher Columbus. In most respects, he was better. Unlike the famous fifteenth century seafarer, Armstrong knew where he landed. He also spent his time in public service, not in jail, and his passing was marked by world-wide encomiums. He ended his days as a celebrated explorer rather than a royal inconvenience.

In the late '60s, I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race.

On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the most expensive selfie in history. As the apex of an 8-year, $130 billion effort, they posed in front of a camera and took a shot designed to do one thing - to show our free enterprise democratic system was better than the rigid, authoritarian system that wanted to destroy us.

Apollo 8 comes a close second, it not equal, to Apollo 11 for the most exciting, memorable moments on the Apollo project.

In Missouri, we built the steamships that plied the Mississippi. It was people of Missouri who believed that a human being could fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. And it was Missourians who built the capsule in which an American first orbited the earth.

From the moment those images of Buzz and Neil arrived on the world's television sets, our human space program has been lost - for a blatantly simple and obvious reason - after the first giant leap to take that first small step, there was no plan for the next one, because there was no second question to be answered.

There was a space program before there was integrated circuits.

I watched the first moon landing at a bar in Paducah, Kentucky, a fact worth mentioning only because I still remember how suddenly silence descended on this raucous place when Neil Armstrong started coming down that ladder.

For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.

I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.

Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.

At the end of October 4 in 1957, when I was coming back from sea duty in the South Pacific, Sputnik went up. I realized that humans would be right behind robot aircraft or spacecraft even though I really had no plans of being in aviation or a professional aviator and certainly not in the military.

Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we're doing that is really fundamentally important, as we leave our home planet, but also exciting.

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel.