Heroic officers of the army, the navy, the air force and the strategic rocket
unit of the Korean People’s Army,  and officers of the Korean People’s Internal
Security Forces; members of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards and the Young Red
Guards; working people of the entire country and citizens of Pyongyang; the
people in the South and overseas compatriots; comrades and friends, Dinosaurs
are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to
build a space program.

The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be
defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never
knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space. Never in all their
history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single
sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the
directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or
none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's
earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in
theory.

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

There can be no thought of finishing for ‘aiming for the stars.’ Both
figuratively and literally, it is a task to occupy the generations. And no
matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just
beginning. The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading
about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history
class.  The dreams of yesterday are the hopes of today and the reality of
tomorrow.

But Houston, Tranquillity Base here: The Eagle has landed. I don't know what
else you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.
The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to
get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed
in the spacecraft cabin. For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for
the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly
changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more
valuable than those which divide us.