Top 100 Astronaut Quotes
#1. I always wanted to be an astronaut.
Jerry Hall
#2. My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.
Michael J. Massimino
#3. It was a real honor for me to get to be the first woman astronaut. I think it's really important that young girls that are growing up today can see that women can be astronauts too. There have actually been a lot of women, who are astronauts, that that's a career that's open to them.
Sally Ride
#4. I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
Rachel Corrie
#5. As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that, I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me.
Taylor Wilson
#6. Well, the coolest thing I have seen so far, in terms of, like, me being an astronaut and seeing something unusual, was the rendezvous, the docking of a Progress spaceship.
Kevin A. Ford
#7. My mother, in the style of the times, told me I could do anything I set my sights on. She said I could be the president, an astronaut, or the next Charles Schulz. I believed her because at that point in my life I hadn't yet noticed the pattern of her deceptions.
Scott Adams
#8. I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Mark Haddon
#9. I loved dinosaurs, I loved space, and I thought maybe I'd be the first paleo-astronaut.
Bill Maris
#10. All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live. - Peloquin
Clive Barker
#11. I have to admit that talking authoritatively about my students' stories can make me feel, at times, like an astronaut who has just landed on a new planet and insists on giving guided tours to its inhabitants.
Etgar Keret
#12. Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things.
Robert Galbraith
#13. Dogbert: So, Since Columbus is dead, you have no evidence that the earth is round. Dilbert: Look. You can Ask Senator John Glenn. He orbited the earth when he was an astronaut. Dogbert: So, your theory depends on the honesty of politicians. Dilbert: Yes ... no, wait ...
Scott Adams
#14. Being a leading man ... that's like saying, 'I want to be astronaut.' That's not going to happen.
Steve Carell
#15. As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.
Brian Skerry
#16. The great thing about being an astronaut is you kind of get to do a little bit of everything. I mean, we're going to ride a rocket uphill.
David M. Brown
#17. I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.
David Mackay
#18. There's a lot of things I nerd out over. Quantum Mechanics. I also love Dungeons and Dragons. I want to be an astronaut.
Analeigh Tipton
#19. When you talk to young girls these days about their role modles, very few mention a chemist like Madame Curie or an astrophysicist and astronaut like Sally Ride, or a zoologist like Jane Goodall. Instead, they look to someone like Madonna ...
W. Ann Reynolds
#20. If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.
Ice-T
#21. I wanted to apply to the astronaut program after the Challenger accident
Eileen Collins
#22. 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.
Eugene Cernan
#23. Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn't
Wernher Von Braun
#24. I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.
Chuck Yeager
#25. Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.
Meg Wolitzer
#26. the phone rang, and I picked it up in the kitchen. It was Mac Evans, asking if I wanted to be an astronaut.
Chris Hadfield
#27. Harriet Tubman was an astronaut, traversing the south to the north by navigating the stars.
Sanford Biggers
#28. The opportunities to become an astronaut in Canada were far and few.
Julie Payette
#29. I flew fighters for the Navy in San Diego for three years, went and did my post-graduate education, and then I was a test pilot in Patuxent River, Maryland, for a few years. I was back in the fleet in the Navy when I was selected to come back here to NASA to become an astronaut.
Alan G. Poindexter
#30. I think doing something of your life is something that you've got deep inside, whether it's to, whether you want to be an astronaut or a, whether you want to do science, or whether you want to be a movie star, or whatever.
Philippe Perrin
#32. It was reported today that the machine on board the International Space Station that turns urine into drinking water has been fixed. After hearing this, an astronaut said, 'Wait. You mean that wasn't lemon Tang?'
Conan O'Brien
#33. You get an astronaut's life whether you want it or not. Leave it all behind for a world you know nothing about. That's just the deal.
Joe Hill
#34. I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.
David Byrne
#35. In the Astronaut Office we're never totally out of training, we always keep our hand in it. But after five years, things have changed and so it's been good to get back into the flow and relearn a lot of things.
Linda M. Godwin
#36. I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I'm in a world of my own.
Muhammad Ali
#37. People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn't true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.
Edwidge Danticat
#38. I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67. That program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us.
Robert Crippen
#39. I like acting for now. But after seeing Apollo 13, what I really want to do is to be an astronaut. I'm dying to go to a space camp next summer!
Natalie Portman
#40. Astronauts cannot pick their nicknames and can only get their nicknames from other astronauts. Any astronaut who tries to give himself a cool nickname will regret it by getting just the opposite from his astronaut friends.
Michael J. Massimino
#41. I need some encouragement. I need to ask myself, "What would an Apollo astronaut do?" He'd drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launchpad, then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my Rover. Man those guys were cool.
Andy Weir
#43. I remember reading about Mae Jemison, that astronaut. That was immensely fantastic to me. This woman went to the moon!
Juliana Rotich
#44. I think there would be no shortage of applicants to the government astronaut corps to be settlers on the planet Mars. And I think this would be very inspiring.
Buzz Aldrin
#45. It just feels nice to be an astronaut again. That's all it is. Not a reluctant farmer, not an electrical engineer, not a long-haul trucker. An astronaut.
Andy Weir
#46. My neighborhood was rough, but I live a great life now. I don't fight that much now. I don't look for it anyway, but if someone hits your mother, whether you're a star, an accountant, or an astronaut or anything ... I mean it's your mother, so I lost my mind.
Shia Labeouf
#47. You think you want to be an astronaut, and then after a while you're a geo-major for whatever reason. That's just the way it is in college.
Rob Brown
#48. Sometimes people ask me how difficult the astronaut program was, but being in Sierra Leone, being responsible for the health of more than 200 people, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at age 26 - that prepared me to take on a lot of different challenges.
Mae Jemison
#49. I was born in 1960 and can still tell you the name of every astronaut from Mercury to Apollo. If I had a chance, I'd love to go into space on one of the privately developed space crafts.
Eric Betzig
#50. I didn't really decide that I wanted to be an astronaut for sure until the end of college.
Sally Ride
#51. So modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.
David Eagleman
#52. And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian.
Chris Hadfield
#53. I saw this movie 'The Right Stuff' when I was in college, and it really rekindled my interest in being an astronaut. I started taking those steps, and then I realized it would be the chance of a lifetime. It would be a dream life: not just a job, but the whole life.
Michael J. Massimino
#54. Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.
Sylvia Earle
#55. I saw sunrises fade and burn among fleets of sparks. The moon blossomed
like a lily carved of bone ...
The Death of the Astronaut, page 390.
Lewis Turco
#56. Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.
Trent Reznor
#57. I think if a writer is being honest they'd admit to a file full of a dozen or more stories that are all started to varying degrees. They're like the kid who wants to be a firefighter and a police officer and an astronaut.
Dan Alatorre
#58. It's like if you're an astronaut and you've been to the moon, what do you want to do with the rest of your life?
Paul McCartney
#59. I'd love to be an astronaut. I bet you get a better understanding of our planet seeing it from a distance.
Tony DiTerlizzi
#60. my house only felt like a home underwater, in floods; my father was an astronaut because to me stars or the distant flashing of satellites seemed closer than wherever he was; when
Neil Hilborn
#61. Now, as an astronaut, I have to bring a Sharpie with me everywhere - so I have a pen to sign autographs.
Chris Hadfield
#62. I remember all the kids picking their chosen career paths and I was thinking, If I'm an actor I can be an astronaut and a policeman and a firefighter. At the time I was so young that I actually thought actors were all of those things.
Chris Lowell
#63. To be one of the world's top space robotic arm operators is a necessary skill for an astronaut, but it doesn't have much carry-over.
Chris Hadfield
#64. My parents were not pushy or anything like that. I think my mom was still expecting me to be an astronaut, but now she is very happy that I'm not doing that.
Berenice Bejo
#65. When I was a kid, they'd say, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" kids would go Wonder Woman, an astronaut. Do you know what I always said? World domination - so we're on our way.
Terri Irwin
#66. By my mid-30s, I just thought, 'This is not going to happen. I am never going to become an astronaut in the U.K.'
David Mackay
#67. Two months after I got out of test pilot school, I saw an advert that said NASA was recruiting more astronauts. The best job you could have as a test pilot was being an astronaut, so I volunteered.
Charles Duke
#68. I'm sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven.
Octavia E. Butler
#69. Listening to critics is like letting Muhammad Ali decide which astronaut goes to the moon.
Robert Duvall
#70. I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.
Christa McAuliffe
#71. I suppose the one quality in an astronaut more powerful than any other is curiosity. They have to get some place nobody's ever been.
John Glenn
#72. He was an astronaut without a suit, but he was still breathing.
John Corey Whaley
#73. It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut.
John L. Phillips
#74. I am surprised nothing has been made of the fact that astronaut Neil Armstrong carried no sidearms when he landed on the moon.
Arthur Goldberg
#75. Sometimes when people find out I'm an astronaut, they ask, "So what do you do when you're not flying in space?
Chris Hadfield
#76. You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.
Richard Dawkins
#77. The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human
being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
#78. Then, much later, my next dream was to become an astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also.
Claude Nicollier
#79. To me, there is something superbly symbolic in the fact that an astronaut, sent up as assistant to a series of computers, found that he worked more accurately and more intelligently than they. Inside the capsule, man is still in charge.
Adlai Stevenson
#80. Although as a boy I had dreamed about going into space, I had completely forgotten about that until one day I received a call from an astronaut, who suggested that I should join the program.
David M. Brown
#81. Every astronaut flew into space for a living. But while NASA has not solved the security problems, I would not put me back into a shuttle - and no other astronaut. The confidence is shaken.
Ulrich Walter
#82. But being a space flight participant is not really the same as being an astronaut. An astronaut is someone who's able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter.
Chris Hadfield
#83. A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut can't be creative. He has to follow a predetermined detailed checklist written by an engineer and if he gets a little creative he'll never fly again.
Burt Rutan
#84. It took me a long time to get selected as an astronaut. In fact, I applied for 20 years before I was selected.
John L. Phillips
#85. Not everyone can be an astronaut and go into space, some people with sufficient resources can purchase and fly sub-orbitally thanks to various companies and for more money (considerably) fly into orbit.
Buzz Aldrin
#86. I've never had a musical career. So I think it's been unaffected. I play the accordion. In terms of thinking of it as a musical career, I think it's sort of like calling yourself an astronaut because you have a shiny suit.
Daniel Handler
#87. I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut.
Alfonso Cuaron
#88. The moon drew me towards it the same way it dragged the heavy oceans. I loved its fragility. Its delicate luminosity. The way it shone its light tenderly and modestly. I longed to touch it, to be an astronaut held in the embrace of its gentle gravity.
Magda Szubanski
#89. The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.
Sally Ride
#90. Now people need special costumes to ride bicycles. I mean, a helmet, what, are you an astronaut??
Fran Lebowitz
#91. Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business.
Alan Shepard
#92. The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.
Mary Roach
#93. Before I settled on music, I wanted to be an archaeologist, an astronaut, all sorts of really diverse things.
Joan Jett
#94. Life as an astronaut in space is a very interesting one. There are things we all take for granted here on earth, like gravity, that can make things a bit challenging. One of the fun things about getting here is the zero gravity and floating around. But it also makes things very difficult.
Kevin A. Ford
#95. I'd love to go back to space, I don't know any astronaut who doesn't want to.
Helen Sharman
#96. You've got to believe you can be a standup before you can be a standup. You have to believe you can act before you can act. You have to believe you can be an astronaut before you can be an astronaut. You've got to believe.
Eddie Izzard
#97. From day one, I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts. As a pilot, I flew in the sky. Now that I am an astronaut, I will fly in space.
Liu Yang
#98. There is no one area of chemical engineering that specifically helped me in my career as an astronaut, it was more the general education in engineering. Also, it was a very difficult and rigorous course. So, it made me strong and resourceful.
Leroy Chiao
#99. As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.
Mary Roach
#100. I watch a lot of astronaut movies ... Mostly Star Wars. And even Han and Chewie use a checklist.
Jon Stewart
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