John Glenn

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years on this planet, it’s that the happiest and most fulfilled people are those who devoted themselves to something bigger and more profound than mer...”

“I say let's not gamble with American jobs and America's future.”

“The best space movie in my view is 'Apollo 13.' That's just the way it happened.”

“I was hooked on aviation, made model airplanes, and never thought I would be able to fly myself. It cost too much. But then World War II came along and changed all that.”

“I think even in bad times it's good to keep some money going into research. And that's the purpose of the whole space program. It's not just exploration and going to see how far we can go ou...”

“If people like Edison had waited to make every - or Ben Franklin or some of those people had waited to solve every problem on Earth before they did their research or before they were curious...”

“You should run your life not by the calendar but how you feel, and what you're interests are and ambitions.”

“You can always say that it was scarce dollars when Lewis and Clark wanted to go to the West Coast and explore the West. And people complained about it, I understand, from a reading of the hi...”

“When the new becomes commonplace, people become accustomed to it. That's a tribute to our sense of adventure.”

“One of the first things I learned in the Marine Corps is that any military mission has to be defined as precisely as you can possibly define it, and then you size the force and equipment for...”

“Old folks have dreams and ambitions too, like everybody else. Don't sit on a couch someplace.”

“As far as entertainment, 'The Right Stuff' is a good movie. As far as a documentary of the early space days, which they purported it to be, it is not at all.”

“It has been my observation that the happiest of people, the vibrant doers of the world, are almost always those who are using - who are putting into play, calling upon, depending upon-the gr...”

“Everywhere that Americans spread off the Eastern seaboard, heading west across this country, they put up the schoolhouse first, hired a schoolteacher, and put all the kids in school.”

“I supported the efforts in Honduras to stop the flow of arms from Nicaragua across to El Salvador.”

“To me, we have never really exploited our ability in low-Earth orbit.”

“The political graveyards are full of people who don't respond.”

“I've seen John Wayne's 'True Grit' about 10 times.”

“Fear connotes something that interferes with what you're doing.”

“Probably, had World War II not come along and intervened, I would have tried to be a doctor. My son's a doctor, and I still take some medical journals to this day.”