Yuri Gagarin Quotes

“Through Jimi Hendrix's music you can almost see the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Junior, the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin in space, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the debut of Spiderman, Martin Luther King Junior’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Ford Mustang cars, anti-Vietnam protests, Mary Quant designing the mini-skirt, Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India, four black students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro North Carolina, President Johnson pushing the Civil Rights Act, flower children growing their hair long and practicing free love, USA-funded IRA blowing up innocent civilians on the streets and in the pubs of Great Britain, Napalm bombs being dropped on the lush and carpeted fields of Vietnam, a youth-driven cultural revolution in Swinging London, police using tear gas and billy-clubs to break up protests in Chicago, Mods and Rockers battling on Brighton Beach, Native Americans given the right to vote in their own country, the United Kingdom abolishing the death penalty, and the charismatic Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It’s all in Jimi’s absurd and delirious guitar riffs.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“An astronaut cannot be suspended in space and not have God in his mind and his heart.”
― Yuri Gagarin

“Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.”
― Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev

“When Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth in April 1961, he carried generations of hopes and dreams into space with him. A growing number of thinkers now believe the 'Overview Effect' heralds nothing less than the next 'giant leap' of human evolution. As breathtaking space-down views of our world seep into our collective consciousness, people are waking up to the 'Spaceship Earth' analogy that depicts our planet as a natural vessel that must be steered responsibly by its crew.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“. . . Much was made of the fact that Yuri Gagarin was an ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union. He was born in the Gzhatsk District of Smolensk and entered secondary school in 1941. But his studies were interrupted by the German invasion. After World War Two Gagarin's family moved back to Gzhatsk, where Yuri resumed his studies. In 1951 he graduated with honours from a vocational school in the town of Lyubersy, near Moscow. He received a foundryman's certificate. He then studied at an industrial technical school in Saratov, on the Volga, from which he graduated with honours in 1955. It was while attending the industrial school that the man who would be the first to fly in space took his first steps in aviation, when he commenced a course of training at the Saratov Aero Club in 1955 . . .”
― Stephen Baxter, Decalog 5 - Wonders