When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

It was just using the liquid shampoo - the Russians have one very similar to the stuff we use on the Shuttle - you just wet your hair with it and then wipe it out.

I think that over the years, whether they want to admit it or not, people have to admit that the women astronauts have performed just as well as the men astronauts.

You're in charge but don't touch the controls.

The only thing it would be nice to have more of would be M & M's.

You think America is the biggest place on Earth, but it's not. [The view from Mir] put everything in perspective.

If you look at the whole thing, I think the most gratifying thing is my kids, without a doubt.

You're in charge but don't touch the controls. Recounting what the two Russian cosmonauts tell her each time they leave the Mir space station for a spacewalk.

The jar of oil is sacred anointing

The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

I have no friends and no enemies - only competitors.

The urgent can drown out the important.

I'm not one of these actors who feels a pressing need to direct, and I have no plans to do it.

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.

Men have torn up the roads which led to Heaven, and which all the world followed; now we have to make our own ladders.

If you believe you can do something, then you can acquire the ability to do it even if you didn't have it in the beginning.

Idealism is based on big ideas. And, as anybody who has ever been asked "What's the big idea?" knows, most big ideas are bad ones.