Clyde Tombaugh Quotes

"I used to believe there were people on Mars, and of course now we know there aren't. Mars held particular interest. I was curious what kind of beings they would look like."

"I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn't expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought."

"I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises."

"The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere."

"They would get books on astronomy out of the city library for me. They would allow me stay up late at night to look at things in the sky."

"To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old."

"We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation."

"When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well."

"When the temperature is freezing, it's a bit hard on your fingers, but I was interested in putting down what I saw. And that's what paid off."

"You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you're competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work."