Orbit Quotes

• Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Space, Earth, Solar System

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• A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study; but, when he comes to see the necessity of those hard bodies, in the constitution of this earth, or for the permanency of the land on which we dwell, and when he finds that there are means wisely provided for the renovation of this necessary decaying part, as well as that of every other, he then, with pleasure, contemplates this manifestation of design, and thus connects the mineral system of this earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits.

  James Hutton

  Moving, Mean, Science

  James Hutton (1795). “Theory of the Earth: With Proofs and Illustrations”

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• Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

  Raymond Loewy

  Science, Civilization, Cities

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• When you can dump a load of bricks on a corner lot, and let me watch them arrange themselves into a house - when you can empty a handful of springs and wheels and screws on my desk, and let me see them gather themselves together into a watch - it will be easier for me to believe that all these thousands of worlds could have been created, balanced, and set to moving in their separate orbits, all without any directing intelligence at all.

  Bruce Barton

  Spring, Believe, Moving

  Masonic News, Volume 8, p. 181, 1927.

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• Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Ignorance, Knowledge, Science

  Pierre-Simon Laplace (2012). “Pierre-Simon Laplace Philosophical Essay on Probabilities: Translated from the fifth French edition of 1825 With Notes by the Translator”, p.3, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

  David Lehman

  Fields, Used, Fixed

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• The orbit of human vision has widened and art has annexed fresh territories that were formerly denied to it.

  Max Bill

  Art, Vision, Territory

  Max Bill, James N. Wood (1974). “Max Bill”

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• I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Trying, Etc, Technique

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• NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.

  James Lovelock

  Sunshine, Space, Earth

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• It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space

  Clifford D. Simak

  Thinking, Space, Nucleus

  Clifford D. Simak (2015). “A Choice of Gods”, p.101, Open Road Media

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• Then if your movie clicks with real audiences, you'll be sucked into some sort of Hollywood orbit. It's a devil of a place where the only religion that really counts is box office.

  Yahoo Serious

  Real, Office, Devil

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle's robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.

  Sally Ride

  Hands, Space, Robots

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• What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited.

  C. Wright Mills

  Men, Vision, Trying

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.3, Oxford University Press

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• I am proud to find, from two astronomical observations, that Chapel Hill lies right in the orbit of Jupiter and his satellites, and that the period of his revolution is about twelve years.

  William Hooper

  Lying, Years, Two

  William Hooper (1859). “Fifty Years Since: An Address, Delivered Before the Alumni of the University of North Carolina, on the 7th of June, 1859, (being the Day Before the Annual Commencement.)”, p.5

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• We launch when we're kind of in the same orbit that they are in terms of being matched up in inclination in space, and we're just in a little different altitude.

  Linda M. Godwin

  Space, Different, Littles

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• After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't.

  John L. Phillips

  Robots, Arms, Rooms

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• Now, I've never flown in space; but the folks who have say that on landing day, you know, you've just spent maybe a week and a half, sometimes two weeks in orbit and you're used to the things happening slowly in space.

  Duane G. Carey

  Two, Space, Half

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• I don't go along with going to Moon first to build a launch pad to go to Mars. We should go to Mars from Earth orbit. We have already been to the Moon; we've already practiced.

  Wally Schirra

  Moon, Mars, Earth

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• The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul.

  Oscar Wilde

  Soul, Finals, Mystery

  Letter to Alfred Douglas, Jan. - Mar. 1897

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• Therefore, in the course of the work I have followed this plan: I describe in the first book all the positions of the orbits together with the movements which I ascribe to the Earth, in order that this book might contain, as it were, the general scheme of the universe.

  Nicolaus Copernicus

  Book, Order, Together

  William Caxton, Jean Calvin, Nicolaus Copernicus, John Knox, Edmund Spenser (1938). “Prefaces and prologues to famous books”

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• You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half.

  Robert Crippen

  Half, World, Hours

  "STS-1 25th Anniversary Interview with Bob Crippen". Interview with George Diller, www.nasa.gov. April 12, 2006.

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• Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

  Robert Crippen

  Earth, Speed, Looking Down

  "STS-1 25th Anniversary Interview with Bob Crippen". Interview with George Diller, www.nasa.gov. April 12, 2006.

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• My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.

  K. Eric Drexler

  Space, Mit, Development

  Foresight Interview, foresight.org.

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• We were only on orbit a little over two days so we had no adverse effects from being weightless...

  Robert Crippen

  Adverse Effects, Two, Littles

  "STS-1 25th Anniversary Interview with Bob Crippen". Interview with George Diller, www.nasa.gov. April 12, 2006.

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• I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

  Quentin Crisp

  God, Order, Giving

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