GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
LYNDON B. JOHNSON

It's too bad, but the way American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away.

President Lyndon B. Johnson

Overheard during a visit to the Apollo 7 crew in training, 1968. Quoted in D. M. Harland, Exploring The Moon: The Apollo Expeditions, 2nd ed. 2008.

The Air Force comes in every morning and says, “Bomb, bomb, bomb.” And then the State Department comes in and says, “Not now, or not there, or too much, or not at all.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson

Quoted in the 1966 book Lyndon B. Johnson and the World.

Our attainments are a major element in the international competition between the Soviet system and our own. The non-military, non-commercial, non-scientific but ‘civilian’ projects such as lunar and planetary exploration are, in this sense, part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war.

James E. Webb and Robert S. McNamara

Report to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, from the then NASA Administrator and the Secretary of Defense, Recommendations for Our National Space Program: Changes, Policies, Goals, 8 May 1961.

There is something more important than any ultimate weapon. That is the ultimate position — the position of total control over Earth that lies somewhere out in space. That is … the distant future, though not so distant as we may have thought. Whoever gains that ultimate position gains control, total control, over the Earth, for the purposes of tyranny or for the service of freedom.

Lyndon B. Johnson, then a Senator for Texas, quoted in U.S. News & World Report magazine, 1958.

If I could get one message to you it would be this: The future of this country and the welfare of the free world depend upon our success in space. There is no room in this country for any but a fully cooperative, urgently motivated all-out effort toward space leadership. No one person, no one company, no one Government agency, has a monopoly on the competence, the missions, or the requirements for the space program. It is and it must continue to be a national job.

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson

Speech at the American Rocket Society, 12 October 1961. Quoted in Aeronautical and Astronautical Events of 1961, NASA/House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 1962.