“A well-meaning team of people can sometimes make horrible decisions that no single individual would make. Groupthink, and an unwillingness to disagree with the bosses, was too often a problem at NASA... None of us is as dumb as all of us.”

“None of us is as dumb as all of us. It means that when you get a group of people together to make a critical decision, groupthink can set in. There's all this technical information, a critical decision needs to be made, and everyone starts marching in the same direction. There might be some people who think it's the wrong decision, but they don't say anything. They just remain a part of the group. We've learned that groups can make stupid decisions that no single individual in the group would make.”

“Mile by mile, it's a trial; yard by yard, it's hard; but inch by inch, it's a cinch.”

“The Congresswoman was depressed by the fact that a woman of her standing could no longer count on making it to the rest room "in time" during the extensive rehabilitation that followed her shooting. Her husband, commander of a space shuttle crew, encouraged her by identifying with her limitation. Even revered astronauts, he revealed, have bodily limits and have to rely on Huggies during extended launch exercises.”

“Pursue your passion, and everything will fall into place. This is not being romantic. This is the highest order of pragmatism.”

“Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realise all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travellers, if that makes any sense.”

“You can either be a bystander who lives his life in reaction to the decisions that others make, or you can be the leader who is making those decisions.”