Weekend Wise Words

Be Smart! Be Brilliant!

I'm in the middle of two weeks vacation after a very difficult summer at work. So I'm in the mindset to look at the fantastic, the nonday today kind of things. We once had our minds set on space. Now? We have canceled the Space Shuttle program. According to one of the last astronauts to fly in the final Space Shuttle mission earlier this year, we will have four or five years off, utilizing the Russian's program to get to space, then start using private industry flights. Okay.

What we need to remember is that we need to keep our imagination open, not just our access to space, but our imagining space and everything about it.

Ellen Ochoa

“What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire - the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.”
– Ellen Ochoa

Arthur C Clarke

"I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books."
— Arthur C Clarke, The View from Serendip, page 238, 1977.

"America has tossed its cap over the wall of space. "
John F. Kennedy

Robert A. Heinlein

"When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere. "
Robert A. Heinlein

Marcel Proust

"Love is space and time measured by the heart. "
Marcel Proust

"Through space, the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought, I comprehend the world."
Blaise Pascal 

Douglas Adams

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space. "
Douglas Adams

"We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space."
Richard Dawkins

"Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind, and space a construct to contain constructs."
Robert Anton Wilson 

And, it pays to look from the outside in at times.

"After one look at this planet, any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager."
William S. Burroughs

In the end, we need our imagination....

Arthur C. Clarke

"Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it."
Arthur C. Clarke