James A. Michener Quotes

We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand, slow march of intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.

The opening of space to human development and settlement is the most important activity of the human species. From hope to health, from wonder to wealth, the environment, and the very act of living, space is the future.

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.

Like most Americans, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I am pro-future, pro-hope, and pro-abundance. I am pro-frontier and will talk to and work with anyone else who shares my belief that it is our goal and destiny to expand life and civilization into space.

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.

To me, the amazing thing is that so much that was science fiction back then, political fiction, today is reality. We have indeed a spacecraft called an international space station. And we have the diversity of this planet working on that ship, including Americans and Russians working side by side. I think the imagineers are the ones that set the goal. And the inventors and the technicians see that as a goal to work toward, or the political scientists and the diplomats. And eventually, that's arrived at.

Exploration of space is worth it because humans need to explore. Knowledge is always good, and it's a really cool thing to see.

I think there's going to be a very sudden shift in people's perception of the International Space Station, because suddenly it's going to look much, much bigger than it already is.

During the period of the Saturn-Apollo missions we were pilgrims in space, ranging from home in search of knowledge. Now we will become shepherds tending our technological flocks, but like the shepherds of old, we will keep our eyes fixed on the heavens.

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.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the first wave of nuclear power. And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be part of it-we mean to lead it.

I think, actually, that it's a really fascinating time in history because the development of modern technology and the photographs the satellites were taking from space were mapping the earth in a new way, making us feel like the globe we inhabit is much smaller than previously conceived of, in the human mind.

The development of space technology, including space warfare today, is similar in its technological-industrial significance to the development of navies a hundred years ago.

For me, one of the most fertile consequences of the space program is the extent to which it stimulates people to innovate because they want to create a different tomorrow than what they're living in today. And it's that culture of innovation that spawns entirely new economies.

The constants all through the centuries will be the same; wine, women and song. Other than that, life will be very different technologically. In the year 3000 the universe will be expanding as it will forever, infinitely. We will probe outer space but never find life as evolutionized as ours. We were not created by a deity. We created the deity in OUR image. Life began on this planet when the first amoeba split. Mankind will still be seeking God, not accepting that God is a spirit; can't see it, touch it, only feel it. It's called LOVE.

We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.

Before another century is done it will be hard for people to imagine a time when humanity was confined to one world, and it will seem to them incredible that there was ever anybody who doubted the value of space and wanted to turn his or her back on the Universe.

We used to joke about canned men, putting people in a can and seeing how far you can send them and bring them back. That's not the purpose of this program... Space is a laboratory, and we go into it to work and learn the new.

During the next 50 years, in countless cycles, in countless entrepreneurial companies, this let's just go and do it mentality will help us finally get off the planet and irreversibly open the space frontier. The capital and tools are finally being placed into the hands of those willing to risk, willing to fail, willing to follow the dreams.

Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.

I believe that the manned space program can engage the public by advancing the space frontier. Every next mission takes you farther out in space than you were before, either technologically or in terms of distance.

I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.

If mankind's greatest achievement is to produce more spaces for mankind to live in, I do not think I am so impressed.

When you think about what Homo sapiens are about, you almost feel that we are replacing ourselves. We won't be able to breathe and breed on this earth, so we replace ourselves with androids that can do. The androids can go up into space and take the future of humanity forward because maybe we just bow out with a carbon-based epoch.