Mad Men's penultimate season ended a few weeks back and the prominence of the moon landing in the season's final episode inspired me to go back through my Evernote quote notebook and excitedly share some of my favorite quotes on the moon landing and exploration with my wife, and I figured why not share them with all of you also :)

The first is from Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan on Going to the moon:

"The truth needs no defense. Nobody can ever take those footsteps I made on the surface of the Moon away from me."

President Obama mentions going to the moon in this great speech to Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia in 2009:

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Are there any West Wing fans out there? I've always loved this quote about exploration from Sam Seaborn in season 2's Galileo:

MALLORY: we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?

SAM: Yes.

MALLORY: Why?

SAM: Because it's next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on the timeline of exploration, and this is what's next.

The last one I have for you is from Stuart Robbins and is one of my favorite quotes of all time:

"If people don't think we were able to go to the moon, then they don't believe in the ingenuity of human achievement [...] Going to the moon and returning astronauts safely back to Earth is arguably one of the most profound achievements in human history, and so when people simply believe it was a hoax, they lose out on that shared experience and doubt what humans can do."

Be inspired! And knowing we sent someone to the moon and brought them safely back, how can you not be?

Update February 2018

So SpaceX and Elon Musk launched a Tesla into space, and this tweet made me laugh...