I personally believe this Agency has always been very dedicated and has always worked as hard as it possibly can to do things as safely and as effectively as possible.

I'll be helping them getting suited up, getting them in the airlock, getting the airlock prepared, and getting them out the hatch, and then talking them through these three spacewalks.

You look at it as a privilege. So you really decide that you're going to put the time in and work really hard to get to the point where you're ready.

I personally believe this Agency has always been very dedicated and has always worked as hard as it possibly can to do things as safely and as effectively as possible.

We're doing a lot of inspection on the leading edge of our wing on 114 and 121, the first two flights.

Well, right now we're so busy that I kind of had to put all the hobbies on hold. But I like going camping with my kids. I have two daughters; they're 7 and 10 years old.

I think I was very interested in the space program as a kid, watching the first Apollo missions to the moon, and it's something I thought that would be a lot of, of fun and exciting and a very worthwhile job.

A trip to space is a big motivator to give up some things in your personal life. Obviously, you can't give up everything and you don't want to.

Having the benefit to our society, not only here in the United States but throughout the world with the amount of invention you get from having a space program, is well worth the risk that an individual like myself has to take by flying in the vehicle.

After the loss of Columbia a couple of years ago, I think we were reminded of the risk. All of us, though, have always known that the Space Shuttle is a very risky vehicle, much more risky than even flying airplanes in combat.

The first two missions have some test objectives, some new capabilities that we're going to try to develop on orbit to possibly be used on later flights.

My family deals with those risks. The best I can do is talk to them about some of those risks. I'm not incredibly specific with them, especially with my kids.

It's important to bring things back from the Space Station because, unlike somebody living at the house where the garbage truck comes by twice a week, they don't have that in space.

There's been a lot of discussion about NASA culture and changing that. I think our culture has always been one of trying to do a very difficult job and do it well.

Later, after flying in the Navy for four or five years, spending some time on an aircraft carrier, I applied to and was accepted in a program where I went to graduate school first and then to the Naval Test Pilots School.

He's working a lot harder than I am. I tell these people that we really appreciate what they're doing for us.

I think we've done that. But it's not something you really notice, 'cause I've always thought the people here have always done their best, and they continue to do their best. They just might do it a little bit differently.

Well, I have an undergraduate degree, a couple of bachelor's degrees, from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.

Three of us will help the other two get suited up, get them in the hatch, and get them out the door.

There's a lot of interest there in the missions that I fly on and the ones my brother's involved with.

There are a lot of dedicated people out there that don't get the recognition that we get, but they're as important as the people that are sitting in the vehicle.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Regrettably, I do sometimes have to fight a tendency to be bitchy.

Women can break down barriers to opportunity, and men, many of them reluctantly, have learned to relate to women as their equals in thought and action. But except for an eccentric few, women do not want to become warriors.

I need you. Right now. Let me love you right here, please.

David and I were divorced in 1980, and there has been silence between us ever since. Despite our decade of marriage and a child together, I was airbrushed out of his life. He never demonstrated any affection or gratitude after we parted. He fired anyone who mentioned my name.

A figure skater is not just a figure skater who does great jumps. He is an artist on ice.

However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.

Our Western society is showing its technological muscles in ever more threatening ways, but the experience of fear, anxiety and even despair has increased in equal proportion. Indeed, the paradox is that the powerful giants feel as powerless as a new-born babe.

I wrote in coffee shops in Japan when I was 22, 23, before I had the stamina to sit down and write. I liked the buzzy environment; I couldn't speak Japanese when I arrived, so it was kind of a white noise. It felt more sociable than being alone, but now, as I've developed a writing practice, I couldn't do it.

No other health disparity is so stark; virtually every woman who dies giving birth lives in a poor country.

I don't want to hide anything - there is nothing to hide.

I don't feel I made any sacrifices at all. I'm doing my best to juggle.

If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.

To be called a sovereign nation, a nation has to be able to control its own borders. It is controlling your own destiny in a way, and we don't control our own borders.

Human beings are a wonderful virus in some ways.

Our landscapes connect us to our history; they are the source of our character as a peopl, as well as our health, our safety, and our prosperity. Natural resources enrich us economically, yes. But they also enrich us aesthetically and recreationally and culturally and spiritually.

Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.

If there was a blacker color than black, I would wear it.

Every creature is a divine word because it proclaims God.

Entrepreneur is not a job title. It is a state of mind of people who want to alter the future.

When I began to act, I was about 6 years old. Everything you learned, every period of history you studied, you did a play about it.

The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.

One of the consistent themes you'll find throughout the Bible is that God will always provide the necessary information about Jesus Christ to someone who sincerely desires to receive that revelation.

Six months after we started, in 1964, there was a day when we sold only seven sandwiches. If we'd taken all the money from the register, we couldn't have paid an employee, much less the food or the rent or all that. It could have been a turning point. We could have given up.