Ad-Rock Quotes

In the '20s they were telling us we'd all have our own private plane and take vacations to the moon.

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.

The car is the most regulated thing in the world. It's more complicated to make a car than it is to send a rocket to space.

For self-driving cars in particular, there are lots of dimensions of this technology beyond just impact on labour. There is a massive potential improvement in public health.

There are those who say that when civilization progresses a bit further transportation facilities will move into the skies and under the ground, and that our streets will again be quiet, but I know perfectly well that when that day comes some new device for torturing the old will be invented.

President Bush announced a billion dollar mission to the moon and Mars. He came up with a snappy new slogan - to drill where no man has drilled before.

I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon.

Life in the twentieth century undeniably has ... such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams.

That hemisphere of the moon which faces us is better known than the earth itself; its vast desert plains have been surveyed to within a few acres; its mountains and craters have been measured to within a few yards; while on the earth's surface there are 30,000,000 square kilometres (sixty times the extent of France), upon which the foot of man has never trod, which the eye of man has never seen.

The environmental agenda before the Congress includes laws to deal with water pollution, pesticide hazards, ocean dumping, excessive noise, careless land development and many other environmental problems. These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship.

In fact, the 20th century I think was the most fascinating century and the whole of man civilization because so much happened.

We can land men on the moon, but, for all our mechanical and electronic wizardry, we cannot reproduce an artificial fore-finger that can feel as well as beckon.

When I finally had the chance to make my childhood dream a reality - as a co-founder and chairman of Moon Express - my goal was to broaden participation in lunar exploration, and connect the common person to its results. We plan to send robotic rovers - not humans - to the Moon to search for precious metals and rare minerals on the Moon's surface.

Frequently on the lunar surface I said to myself, 'This is the Moon, that is the Earth. I'm really here, I'm really here!'

We had risen to probably one of the greatest challenges in history, put a man on the moon in the decade. We'd created incredible technologies. But what was most important, we'd created the teams, what I call the human factor. People who were energized by a mission.

We have all kinds of limitations as human beings. I mean we can't see the whole electromagnetic spectrum, we can't see the very small, we can't see the very far. So we compensate for these short comings with technological scaffoldings. The microscope allows us to extend our vision into the microsphere. The telescope allows us to extend our vision into the macrosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope extends our optic nerve into space, and it allows us to mainline space and time through our optic nerve.

I don't see anything beneficial about the US spending 100 billion dollars to go back to the moon unless we learn something new that will help us go to the moons of Saturn okay and so we ought to use that to breed new breakthroughs and to test new breakthroughs and to fund it.

Medicine, electronic communications, space travel, genetic manipulation . . . these are the miracles about which we now tell our children. These are the miracles we herald as proof that science will bring us the answers. The ancient stories of immaculate conceptions, burning bushes, and parting seas are no longer relevant. God has become obsolete. Science has won the battle.

I read a fair amount [of science fiction], and you know it was certainly inspirational. I have to pinch myself to think that we might be able to make some of [what I've read in science fiction books] come true.

It's the Twentieth Century ... no more miracles.

Apollo wasn't just about sending people into space. It transformed so much of our economy. From our education system to so many of the things we use today, it was a vision that led to the total transformation of the planet.

There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make sense: 'Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.'

We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.

The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on 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.