Top 80 Sally Ride Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Our future lies with today’s kids and tomorrow’s space exploration.”

— Sally Ride

Featured in: Space Quotes

2. “The stars don’t look bigger, but they do look brighter.”

— Sally Ride

Featured in: Space Quotes

3. “Three Secrets to Success: Be willing to learn new things. Be able to assimilate new information quickly. Be able to get along with and work with other people.”

— Sally Ride

4. “The best advice I can give anybody is to try to understand who you are and what you want to do, and don’t be afraid to go down that road and do whatever it takes and work as hard as you have to work to achieve that.”

— Sally Ride

5. “Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It’s posing questions and coming up with a method. It’s delving in.”

— Sally Ride

6. “We need to make science cool again.”

— Sally Ride

7. “I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals.”

— Sally Ride

8. “When you’re getting ready to launch into space, you’re sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.”

— Sally Ride

9. “All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.”

— Sally Ride

10. “If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.”

— Sally Ride

11. “Then during the mission itself, I used the space shuttle’s robot arm to release a satellite into orbit.”

— Sally Ride

12. “I suggest taking the high road and have a little sence of humour and let things roll off your back. I think that’s very important.”

— Sally Ride

13. “The thing I’ll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In fact, I’m sure it was the most fun that I’ll ever have in my life.”

— Sally Ride

14. “For whatever reason, I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.”

— Sally Ride

15. “My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.”

— Sally Ride

16. “We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form.”

— Sally Ride

17. “If it wasn’t for the women’s movement, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

— Sally Ride

18. “But when I wasn’t working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.”

— Sally Ride

19. “For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences.”

— Sally Ride

20. “The view of earth is absolutely spectacular, and the feeling of looking back and seeing your planet as a planet is just an amazing feeling. It’s a totally different perspective, and it makes you appreciate, actually, how fragile our existence is.”

— Sally Ride

21. “I think it’s important for little girls growing up, and young women, to have one in every walk of life. So from that point of view, I’m proud to be a role model!”

— Sally Ride

22. “If they asked me if I wanted to go into space tomorrow, I’d do it in a heartbeat. On the other hand, if they asked me if I wanted to go into training for three years and then go into space again, I’d probably say no.”

— Sally Ride

23. “I find myself looking around for other new, interesting opportunities to dive into.”

— Sally Ride

24. “When you can feel that close to something you’re used to seeing from this great distance, well, it changes a person.”

— Sally Ride

25. “I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.”

— Sally Ride

26. “I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps – space stamps and Olympics stamps.”

— Sally Ride

27. “After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.”

— Sally Ride

28. “The view of Earth is spectacular.”

— Sally Ride

29. “Weightless is a great equalizer.”

— Sally Ride

30. “Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.”

— Sally Ride

31. “It was a real honor for me to get to be the first woman astronaut. I think it’s really important that young girls that are growing up today can see that women can be astronauts too. There have actually been a lot of women, who are astronauts, that that’s a career that’s open to them.”

— Sally Ride

32. “I did not come to NASA to make history.”

— Sally Ride

33. “I’ve spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don’t see why I should start now.”

— Sally Ride

34. “It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.”

— Sally Ride

35. “Because I was a tennis player, Billie Jean King was a hero of mine.”

— Sally Ride

36. “I liked math – that was my favorite subject – and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.”

— Sally Ride

37. “My parents must have done a great job. Anytime I wanted to pursue something that they weren’t familiar with, that was not part of their lifestyle, they let me go ahead and do it.”

— Sally Ride

38. “The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class – my class had 29 men and 6 women – those men were all very used to working with women.”

— Sally Ride

39. “It’s easy to sleep floating around – it’s very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don’t float into somebody or something!”

— Sally Ride

40. “Different astronauts sleep in different ways.”

— Sally Ride

41. “Ever been to Disneyland? That was definitely an E ticket!”

— Sally Ride

42. “The food isn’t too bad. It’s very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.”

— Sally Ride

43. “I don’t have any nicknames.”

— Sally Ride

44. “Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.”

— Sally Ride

45. “For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.”

— Sally Ride

46. “So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion – because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there’s not very much you can do.”

— Sally Ride

47. “The pressure suit helps if something goes wrong during launch or re-entry – astronauts have a way to parachute off the shuttle. The suits protect you from loss of pressure in case of emergency.”

— Sally Ride

48. “NASA has to approve whatever we wear, so there are clothes to choose from, like space shorts – we wear those a lot – and NASA T-shirts.”

— Sally Ride

49. “Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.”

— Sally Ride

50. “It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.”

— Sally Ride