Robert H Goddard Quotes

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

Just remember - when you think all is lost, the future remains.

The reason many people fail is not for lack of vision but for lack of resolve and resolve is born out of counting the cost.

Just remember - when you think all is over, the future remains.

[J]ust as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant to safely pronounce anything impossible, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp. Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition as he, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

Goddard was not personally religious; his most immediate and consistent motivation was a desire for recognition as the founding genius of rocket science.

revised model was ready on 16 March, a clear, cold, still day.

Dr. Huer was modeled on a man whose face and ambitions to send rockets into space were familiar to newspaper readers everywhere—

He had the vision, certainly, and there was almost nothing that was later developed successfully that he didn’t try, at least once. But he was very much a loner.

He had discovered that a rocket was more accurate when its head end was heavier than the rest of the missile, an elementary principle of ballistic stability known to archers for millennia.40

What he achieved was far more than his detractors in the past generation have suggested, even if less than his boosters in the previous generation claimed.

This … made me realize that if a way to navigate space were to be discovered—or invented—it would be the result of a knowledge of physics and mathematics…

in those days the idea of a rocket ship was just foolishness. Anyone interested in it, we thought, must have been a little off. I felt the faculty respected him as a physicist … but still [thought he was] queer.

Esther Goddard faced a problem similar to Libbie Custer’s.