I looked and looked but I didn't see God. - Yuri Gagarin, 14 April 1961

To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage, single-handed, in an unprecedented duel with nature—could one dream of anything more?

- Yuri Gagarin prior to flight, 1961

It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

- Wernher von Braun

The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me -- a small disk, 240,000 miles away. . . . Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance.

- Frank Borman, Commander Apollo 8

For myself, I like a universe that, includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.

—'Can We know the Universe?' in M. Gardner (ed.), The Sacred Beetle and Other Great Essays in Science (1985), 109.