“From the vantage point of my warm, comfortable spot on mother earth, I could see off into infinite space and the eternity of time. In just a few hours, I thought, some of us are going to make that leap into eternity. And I will be one of the instruments of that voyage. I may also be one of the travelers....It's going to happen sooner or later. But if today is my day-I'm going to have a cup of coffee first.”

“I don’t know when my time on earth will be up; but I DO know that today, I am one day closer. You can bet I’m going to make this day count! Will you?”

“My first words, as I was being born [...] I looked up at my mother and said, 'that's the last time I'm going up one of those.”

“Today's my birthday On mans scale 53 is a life more than 1/2 over. On the infinite scale of an eternal being I am just a cell of life that has forever to go!”

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

“I live my life based on 2 principles. One, I live as if today was my last day on earth. Two, I live today as if I am going to live forever.”