Top 35 Gene Cernan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Curiosity is the essence of human existence.”

— Gene Cernan

2. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

3. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

4. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

5. “It’s our destiny to explore. It’s our destiny to be a space-faring nation.”

— Gene Cernan

6. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

7. “OK, let’s get this mother out of here.”

— Gene Cernan

8. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

9. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

10. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

11. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

12. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

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

— Gene Cernan

14. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

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

— Gene Cernan

16. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

17. “I’m quite disappointed that I’m still the last man on the moon.”

— Gene Cernan

18. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

19. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

20. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

21. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

22. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

23. “I’ve been asked about UFOs and I’ve said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization.”

— Gene Cernan

24. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Gene Cernan

26. “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?”

— Gene Cernan

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

— Gene Cernan

28. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

29. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

30. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

31. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

32. “If you begin to think you’re something you’re not, you’re looking in the wrong mirror.”

— Gene Cernan

33. “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.”

— Gene Cernan

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

— Gene Cernan

35. “People try to typecast astronauts as heroic and superhuman. We’re only human beings.”

— Gene Cernan

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

— Gene Cernan

37. “Neil Armstrong was probably one of the most human guys I’ve ever known in my life.”

— Gene Cernan