Gene Cernan quotes:

I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.

As I step off at the surface at Taurus-Littrow, I'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible.

The countdown reached ten seconds and I could almost hear an invisible crescendo of stirring background music. 'Anchors aweigh!' Five, four, three, two, one... and we had ignition!

Am I willing to go to Mars? Yes, but I'm not willing to spend nine months getting there, then wait 18 more months until the planets align to come home.

As we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. As I take these last steps from the surface for some time to come, I'd just like to record that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. Godspeed the crew of Apollo Seventeen.

Some astronauts describe the routine flushing of urine into space, where the freezing temperatures turn the droplets into a cloud of bright, drifting crystals, as being among the most amazing sights they saw on an entire voyage.

One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you've seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you're talking about; and then take pictures of them.

Neil Armstrong was probably one of the most human guys I've ever known in my life.

Curiosity is the essence of human existence.

Chemical propulsion is obsolete to go anywhere other than the moon. Three days - that's acceptable. But for Mars, we need propulsion technologies to get us there in, say, 60 days - then spend whatever length of time we want to spend and return when we want to come home.

Another hundred years may pass before we understand the true significance of Apollo. Lunar exploration was not the equivalent of an American pyramid, some idle monument to technology, but more of a Rosetta stone, a key to unlocking dreams as yet undreamed.

I know the stars are my home. I learned about them, needed them for survival in terms of navigation. I know where I am when I look up at the sky. I know where I am when I look up at the Moon; it's not just some abstract romantic idea, it's something very real to me. See, I've expanded my home.

After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards the next horizon. The United States had become a space-faring nation, but threw it away. We have sacrificed space exploration for space exploitation, which is interesting but scarcely visionary.

I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill.

Curiosity is the essence of our existence.

I do believe there is life in outer space. Mathematically, there has to be, and if you believe as I do that there is a creator of the universe, then how can we be so arrogant to believe he created life here and nowhere else?

I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership in the world, to explore, to seek knowledge.

I'm quite disappointed that I'm still the last man on the moon.

Mom was always doing something for somebody. She came from a Czech background, one that made her a devout Catholic and gave her a strong belief in the family.

OK, let's get this mother out of here.

Nobody can take those footsteps I made on the surface of the moon away from me.

It's our destiny to explore. It's our destiny to be a space-faring nation.

Curiosity is the essence of human existence and exploration has been part of humankind for a long time. The exploration of space, like the exploration of life, if you will, is a risk. We've got to be willing to take it.

Curiosity is the essence of human existence. 'Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?' I don't know. I don't have any answers to those questions. I don't know what's over there around the corner. But I want to find out.

Get the shuttle out of the garage. It's in its prime of its life. How could we just put it away?

Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I'm still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.

If the guidance failed or started to stray or went somewhere we didn't like or the ground didn't like, I could flip a switch, and I could control seven, over seven and a half million pounds of thrust with this handle and fly the thing to the Moon myself.

If you begin to think you're something you're not, you're looking in the wrong mirror.

I've been asked about UFOs and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization.

Once I finally stepped on the moon, no matter what was to come of the next three days - or the rest of my life - nobody could take those steps from me. People ask how long will they be there, and I say forever, however long forever is, like my daughter's initials that I scribbled in the sand [TDC for Tracy Dawn Cernan].

People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We're only human beings.

Perhaps the two greatest moments of my life were standing on the moon and being outside of the room when my granddaughter was born! We tend not to remember the worst.

Prepare for the unknown, unexpected and inconceivable . . . after 50 years of flying I'm still learning every time I fly.

Some of the most exciting space education in the country is not coming out of Washington or New York or California or even Texas. It's coming from a place in Kansas called the Cosmosphere.

The mass gross absence of sound in space is more than just silence.

The moon is bland in color. I call it shades of gray. You know, the only color we see is what we bring or the Earth, which is looking down upon us all the time. And to find orange soil on the moon was a surprise.

To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.

Today, we are on a path of decay. We are seeing the book close on five decades of accomplishment as the leader in human space exploration.

We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.

We leave as we came and, god willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.

We went into darkness after being in daylight the whole time on the way to the Moon. And then we went into darkness. And we're in the shadow... of the Moon.

We will certainly see teachers, journalists, artists and poets in space. Whatever it takes to the be the best is what it will take to get you into space.

When you head on out to the Moon, in very short order, and you get a chance to look back at the Earth, that horizon slowly curves around in upon himself, and all of sudden you're looking at something that is very strange, but yet is very, very familiar, because you're beginning to see the Earth evolve.

Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long.