MARS QUOTES
quotations about Mars
Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to the shimmering red presence in the clear night sky.
JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Mars Beckons
President Bush announced that we were landing on Mars today ... which means he's given up on Earth.
JON STEWART
The Daily Show
Dominating all earth from outer space will have an out-of-this-world price tag, perhaps more than $1 trillion. A question: Why reach for the stars with guns in our hands? Are there weapons of mass destruction on Mars?
DENNIS KUCINICH
speech in U.S. House of Representatives, May 19, 2005
Mars is there, waiting to be reached.
BUZZ ALDRIN
"Buzz Aldrin: Down to Earth", Psychology Today, May/June 2001
By 2030, humans are expected to live on Mars. They'll set up agricultural systems on the Red Planet, oxygen-pumping shelters, and experiments -- beginning life as a multiplanetary species on a harsh planet where they will very likely develop a mental illness and eventually die. It will not be a pleasant experience.
SARAH SLOAT
"The Key to Survival on Mars Is Religion, Argues Scientist", Inverse, November 3, 2017
Am I the only one who secretly hopes that the Curiosity rover will be swallowed up by a giant alien worm living just below Mars's surface?
VICTORIA LAURIE
Twitter post, December 16, 2014
When we set out to land people on the surface of Mars, I think we should as a nation, as a world, commit ourselves to supporting a growing settlement and colonization there. To visit a few times and then withdraw would be an unforgivable waste of resources.
BUZZ ALDRIN
interview, Scholastic, November 17, 1998
There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.
RAY BRADBURY
Rhodomagnetic Digest, May 1950
I'm convinced that sending people to Mars is so expensive that if you go once and bring the people back and then go again and bring the people back, we're eventually going to run out of money. But what if we send people the first time and they don't come back? What if they stay there?
BUZZ ALDRIN
Vanity Fair, July 2010
The Mars Polar Lander cost the average American the price of half a cheeseburger. A human lander would cost the average American more -- perhaps even ten cheeseburgers! So be it. That is no great sacrifice.
JONAH GOLDBERG
National Review Online, May 3, 2000
It's not the value of the rocks we brought back, or the great poetic statements that will be uttered. Those things aren't remembered. It's that people witnessed that event. We are not going to justify going to Mars by what we bring back.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Magnificent Desolation
Mars is like that uncleaned closet we have neglected for millenniums. Sin has collected there like bric-a-brac. Mars is twice Earth's age and has had double the number of Saturday nights, liquor baths, and eye-poppings at women as naked as white seals. When we open that closet door, things will fall on us.
RAY BRADBURY
The Illustrated Man
Thou art the Mars of malcontents.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Mars is far more attractive as an outpost colony for earthlings than the moon is.
BUZZ ALDRIN
interview, New Jersey Monthly, June 2009
The Mars we had found was just a big moon with a thin atmosphere and no life. There were no martians, no canals, no water, no plants, no surface characteristics that even faintly resembled Earth's.
BRUCE MURRAY
Journey into Space: The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
JOHN GRAY
Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus
The planet Mars -- crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms -- has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.
DAVID GRINSPOON
Scientific American, November 2005
We may discover resources on the moon or Mars that will boggle the imagination, that will test our limits to dream. And the fascination generated by further exploration will inspire our young people to study math, and science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers.
GEORGE W. BUSH
speech at NASA Headquarters, January 14, 2004
Our picture of the rich geological history of the Martian flood plains and highlands will be an incomplete one if we are unwilling to make the perilous trip to Mars and look at the Martian hills through our own eyes, instead of the eyes of a television camera.
HENRY JOY MCCRACKEN
LM, November 1997
I don't know why you're on Mars. Maybe you're there because we recognize we have to carefully move small asteroids around to avert the possibility of one impacting the Earth with catastrophic consequences, and while we're up in near-Earth space, it's only a hop, skip, and a jump to Mars. Or maybe we're on Mars because we recognize that if there are human communities on many different worlds, the chances of us being rendered extinct by some catastrophe on one world is much less. Or maybe we're on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there, that the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Or maybe we're on Mars because we have to be, because there's a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process. We come, after all, from hunter-gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we've been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to is Mars. But whatever the reason you're on Mars is, I'm glad you're there. And I wish I was with you.
CARL SAGAN
attributed, Going to Mars: The Stories Of The People Behind NASA's Mars Missions Past, Present, and Future