Quotes by Mae Jemison

“I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger vo...”

“Sometimes people ask me how difficult the astronaut program was, but being in Sierra Leone, being responsible for the health of more than 200 people, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a y...”

“Some people say they feel very small when they think about space. I felt more expansive, very connected to the universe.”

“I always knew I'd go to space.”

“The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the sam...”

“We look at science as something very elite, which only a few people can learn. That's just not true. You just have to start early and give kids a foundation. Kids live up, or down, to expectations.”

“I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate - it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop,...”

“Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.”

“Once I got into space, I was feeling very comfortable in the universe. I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe, that I belonged here as much as any speck of stardust, any comet, a...”

“Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations… If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won’t exist because you’ll have already shut it out… You can hear other people’s wisdom, ...”

“If we describe the near future as 10, 20, 15 years from now, that means that what we do today is going to be critically important, because in the year 2015, in the year 2020, 2025, the world our so...”

“People have this idea that science and the arts are really separate; we think of them as separate and different things. And this idea was probably introduced centuries ago, but it's really becoming...”

“People talk about the '60s all the time. And they talk about the anarchy that was there. But when I think about the '60s, what I took away from it was that there was hope for the future.”

“The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us. It's our attempt to influence things, the universe ...”

“We had someone talk about measuring emotions and getting machines to figure out what to keep us from acting crazy. No, we shouldn't measure. We shouldn't use machines to measure road rage and then ...”

“We need to revitalize the arts and sciences today. We need to take responsibility for the future. We can't hide behind saying it's just for company profits, or it's just a business, or I'm an artis...”

“I like to think of ideas as potential energy. They're really wonderful, but nothing will happen until we risk putting them into action.”