We didn't have practical model rockets in the '50s. The ones we made were very dangerous and the kids that played with them didn't have all their fingers, and sometimes were blind in one eye.

In 12 or 15 years, there will be routine, affordable space tourism not just in the U.S. but in a lot of countries.

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The smart people dont.

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.

I believe that research, that you can claim that you're doing research only if half of the people, and I'm talking about half of the experts, believe that the goal is impossible.

A true creator researches how to have confidence in nonsense.

NASA's myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation.

Everything looks nonsensical before it works.

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding

I have a hunch the most important reason we're going to space is not known now.

Look at the aerospace industry as it was just after the Kennedy talk. We were hiring like crazy. We were trying to get people graduated from college. Hey, you got to go to the program. We need you.

Just for the record, I have come to fear all of your ideas in advance, simply from having endured enough of them.

Companies should be the best possible place to practice fulfillment, to live out values and to realize deep connectivity and purpose.

Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.

I don't know what it is about accents that makes me want to get undressed and high-five myself.

I wanna be your happiness. I wanna be your common sense pain.

It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening.

I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A scream is not a discovery.