Elon Musk Quotes

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

The universe for me was other planets and other star systems and other galaxies. I enjoyed tracking it, but it had no specific influence on my ambitions for that reason. It wasn't really far enough away from Earth to matter to me.

The choice, as Wells once said, is the Universe-or nothing. . . . The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still untrodden heights and will be descending again the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.

I think that space flight is a condition of Nature that comes into effect when an intelligent species reaches the saturation point of its planetary habitat combined with a certain level of technological ability... I think it is a built-in gene-directed drive for the spreading of the species and its continuation.

There's a certain romanticism associated with exploration of space, which is one of the major factors why we'll continue.

There's an old saying in the space community: 'If God wanted us to be a spacefaring species, he would have given us a moon'.

And from, you know, small ideas, bigger ideas emerge. So we're starting with suborbital space flights and we'll then go into orbital space flights and, you know, maybe one day we'll send people on a one-way voyage into the depths of space as per the science fiction trips.

Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

The greatest gain from space travel consists in the extension of our knowledge. In a hundred years this newly won knowledge will pay huge and unexpected dividends.

The first inspiration I ever had was the cosmos, the planetary system.

I think no matter where we go in space to me the important thing is not only getting there and getting back, but it's also doing research, because that opens up as a possibility with that new distance of travel in space.

There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.

I think that Enterprise was getting better and better, actually, and if it had kept going, I think it would've turned into as good a show as any other in the Star Trek franchise.

This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.

Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.

Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth .

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars.

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it - for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other?

The moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

The sight of stars always sets me dreaming just as naively as those black dots on a map set me dreaming of towns and villages. Why should these points of light in the firmament, I wonder, be less accessible than the dark ones on the map of France? We take a train to go to Torascon or Roven and we take death to a star.

We're not sane enough yet to enter space until we learn to live together in peace on Earth.