Alan Shepard Thinking Quotations

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

I'd like to say I was smart enough to finish six grades in five years, but I think perhaps the teacher was just glad to get rid of me.

I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on.

I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.

I think about the personal accomplishment, but there's more of a sense of the grand achievement by all the people who could put this man on the moon.