quotations about Mars
The fact that someone had decided I'd be safer on Mars, where you could still only SORT OF breathe the air and SORT OF not get sunburned to death, was a sign that the war with the aliens was not going fantastically well.
SOPHIA MCDOUGALL
Mars Evacuees
Know you why the robin's breast
Gleameth of a dusky red
Like the lustre mid the stars
Of the potent planet Mars?
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
"Why the Robin's Breast Is Red", Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne
There are many reasons for going to Mars -- practical, spiritual and political. But the most important reason is that while people are still excited by the promise of space exploration, they are frustrated by it, because they can see that we're not actually exploring anymore. People aren't excited by International Space Station hardware delivery missions to low-Earth orbit, or by scientific flights, regardless of how useful they are. People want a more noble and ambitious space programme. Give the public Mars, and public support for the space programme will fly like a rocket.
STUART ATKINSON
New Mars, March 7, 2003
One day Earth will be as Mars is today. This will sober us. It's an object lesson in civilizations.
RAY BRADBURY
The Martian Chronicles
There is a flower that grows on Mars. It is red and harsh and fit for our soil. It is called haemanthus. It means "blood blossom."
PIERCE BROWN
Red Rising
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, strange beings who landed in New Jersey tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from Mars.
ORSON WELLES
The War of the Worlds
Before we go there and set up greenhouses, dance clubs, and falafel stands, let's make sure that, in some subtle form that could be harmed by the human hubbub, life does not already exist there. If not, then by all means build cities, plant forests and fill lakes and streams with trout -- bring life to Mars and Mars to life. We'll then be the Martians we've been dreaming about for all these years.
DAVID GRINSPOON
Slate, January 7, 2004
Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that's what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Vanity Fair, July 2010
They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially "colonized" it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!
ANDY WEIR
The Martian
I wonder ... if Mars is hell? Only waiting for our arrival before it bursts into brimstone and fire.
RAY BRADBURY
The Illustrated Man
The Viking Lander on Mars is a toy grown to large size, a metaphor of a dream; that dream of extending our will, our hand, our seeing eye to another world. It is not a machine, it is us.
RAY BRADBURY
Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures
I'm surprised to see people get so wildly excited about a possible bacterium on Mars when our own planet is crawling with undiscovered species.
GEORGE SCHALLER
Awake! Magazine, 1998
She saw the snowy poles of moonless Mars.
ALFRED TENNYSON
"The Palace of Art"
If we study the effect of 0.38 on the body around the clock, and it doesn't work, you can cross off Mars as a human settlement site until we do sort out the medical diagnosis.
JIM LOGAN
"Humans traveling to Mars may soon be possible but survival is a complete unknown, expert says", CNBC, November 12, 2017
There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.
CARL SAGAN
Pale Blue Dot
I want to fly away.
(Yeah Yeah Yeah)
Let's go to see the stars
the Milky Way, and even Mars
where it could be just ours.
LENNY KRAVITZ
Fly Away
"Mars is empty, there is no life there," we shout: There is life on Mars, and it is us. We are the Martians. We give ourselves a gift of us. We are more than water, we are more than earth, we are more than sun. We are the Life Force giving itself a reason for being.
RAY BRADBURY
A Chapbook for Burnt-Out Priests, Rabbis, and Ministers
You know what Mars is? It's like a thing I got for Christmas seventy years ago--don't know if you ever had one--they called them kaleidoscopes, bits of crystal and cloth and beads and pretty junk. You held it up to the sunlight and looked in through at it, and it took your breath away. All the patterns! Well, that's Mars. Enjoy it. Don't ask it to be nothing else but what it is.
RAY BRADBURY
The Martian Chronicles
Going to Mars would evolve humankind into a two-planet species.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Cosmos Magazine, October 21, 2013
Landing on Mars, with an atmosphere that can burn up spacecraft on entry, is not the same as the smooth, airless ride of landing on the Moon. And living on a planet that is on average 140 million miles from Earth is certainly not the same as living on on a moon that is a mere (cosmically speaking) 240,000 mile trip. Fortunately, the Moon provides an opportunity to test and refine the technology needed to reach the Red Planet -- we just don't need to land there. Life support, long-distance operations and astronaut health can all be tested in the space around the Moon. NASA could establish a national infrastructure to bootstrap our way to Mars that also supports other countries and commercial companies in their efforts to reach the lunar surface.
CASEY DREIER
"The moon is one step; Mars is the prize", Axios, November 2, 2017