Thomas and Harold M. President, those are the facts, and you must see that your order cannot be executed. President, I cannot do it. The order is an improper one, and I cannot execute. Secretary, it will have to be done. Grant and took full responsibility for his action. As usual, Mr. Lincoln had to take more factors into consideration than did his subordinates. I cannot add to Mr. His position is one of the most difficult in the world. Thousands in the army blame him because they are not promoted and other thousands out of the army blame him because they are not appointed.
The pressure upon him is immeasurable and unending. He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry waters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land. Gentlemen, I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces.
Without him I should be destroyed. He performs his task superhumanly. Now do not mind this matter, for Mr. Stanton is right and I cannot wrongly interfere with him. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the the yard lines.
Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.
We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public. To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead. The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.
Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains. And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth.
What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community.
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year1s space budget is three times what it was in January , and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority--even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.
But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, , miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25, miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.
I'm the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. However, I think we're going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid.
I don't think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university.
It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade. I am delighted that this university is playing a part in putting a man on the moon as part of a great national effort of the United States of America. Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it.
He said, "Because it is there. Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
Skip past main navigation. President John F. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen: I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief. I am delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion.
Thank you. Identifier Accession. Rights Access Status. Relation Is Part Of Desc. Subject Geog. Type Category. Format Medium. In this instance, he tries to listen well, but he has difficulty concentrating on what A has to say.
A starts talking and B launches into the listening process, grasping every word and phrase that comes into his ears. Subconsciously, B decides to sandwich a few thoughts of his own into the aural ones that are arriving so slowly. There is plenty of time for B to do just what he has done, dash away from what he hears and then return quickly, and he continues taking sidetracks to his own private thoughts.
Indeed, he can hardly avoid doing this because over the years the process has become a strong aural habit of his. But, sooner or later, on one of the mental sidetracks, B is almost sure to stay away too long.
When he returns, A is moving along ahead of him. At this point it becomes harder for B to understand A, simply because B has missed part of the oral message. The private mental sidetracks become more inviting than ever, and B slides off onto several of them. Slowly he misses more and more of what A has to say. When A is through talking, it is safe to say that B will have received and understood less than half of what was spoken to him.
A major task in helping people to listen better is teaching them to use their spare thinking time efficiently as they listen. We found that good listeners regularly engage in four mental activities, each geared to the oral discourse and taking place concurrently with that oral discourse. All four of these mental activities are neatly coordinated when listening works at its best. Here are the four processes:. He pays attention to nonverbal communication facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice to see if it adds meaning to the spoken words.
Why is he doing so? The speed at which we think compared to that at which people talk allows plenty of time to accomplish these four mental tasks when we listen; however, they do require practice before they can become part of the mental agility that makes for good listening.
In our training courses we have devised aural exercises designed to give people this practice and thereby build up good habits of aural concentration. Another factor that affects listening ability concerns the reconstruction of orally communicated thoughts once they have been received by the listener.
To illustrate:. The newspapers reported not too long ago that a church was torn down in Europe and shipped stone by stone to America, where it was reassembled in its original form. The moving of the church is analogous to what happens when a person speaks and is understood by a listener. The talker has a thought. To transmit his thought, he takes it apart by putting it into words. The words, sent through the air to the listener, must then be mentally reassembled into the original thought if they are to be thoroughly understood.
But most people do not know what to listen for, and so cannot reconstruct the thought. It seems logical enough to do so. If a person gets all the facts, he should certainly understand what is said to him. Therefore, many people try to memorize every single fact that is spoken. Memorizing facts is, to begin with, a virtual impossibility for most people in the listening situation. As one fact is being memorized, the whole, or part, of the next fact is almost certain to be missed.
When he is doing his very best, the listener is likely to catch only a few facts, garble many others, and completely miss the remainder. Even in the case of people who can aurally assimilate all the facts that they hear, one at a time as they hear them, listening is still likely to be at a low level; they are concerned with the pieces of what they hear and tend to miss the broad areas of the spoken communication.
When people talk, they want listeners to understand their ideas. The facts are useful chiefly for constructing the ideas. Grasping ideas, we have found, is the skill on which the good listener concentrates. He remembers facts only long enough to understand the ideas that are built from them. But then, almost miraculously, grasping an idea will help the listener to remember the supporting facts more effectively than does the person who goes after facts alone.
This listening skill is one which definitely can be taught, one in which people can build experience leading toward improved aural communication. In different degrees and in many different ways, listening ability is affected by our emotions. Or, on the other hand, when someone says what we especially want to hear, we open our ears wide, accepting everything—truths, half-truths, or fiction. We might say, then, that our emotions act as aural filters.
At times they in effect cause deafness, and at other times they make listening altogether too easy. If we hear something that opposes our most deeply rooted prejudices, notions, convictions, mores, or complexes, our brains may become over-stimulated, and not in a direction that leads to good listening.
We mentally plan a rebuttal to what we hear, formulate a question designed to embarrass the talker, or perhaps simply turn to thoughts that support our own feelings on the subject at hand. The fuming general manager may hear this—if the accountant presses hard enough—but the chances are he will fail to comprehend it.
When emotions make listening too easy, it usually results from hearing something which supports the deeply rooted inner feelings that we hold. When we hear such support, our mental barriers are dropped and everything is welcomed. We ask few questions about what we hear; our critical faculties are put out of commission by our emotions. Thinking drops to a minimum because we are hearing thoughts that we have harbored for years in support of our inner feelings.
It is good to hear someone else think those thoughts, so we lazily enjoy the whole experience. What can we do about these emotional filters? The solution is not easy in practice, although it can be summed up in this simple admonition: hear the man out.
Following are two pointers that often help in training people to do this:. It requires self-control, sometimes more than many of us can muster, but with persistent practice it can be turned into a valuable habit. While listening, the main object is to comprehend each point made by the talker. Judgments and decisions should be reserved until after the talker has finished.
At that time, and only then, review his main ideas and assess them. Seldom do we make a search for evidence to prove ourselves wrong.
The latter type of effort is not easy, for behind its application must lie a generous spirit and real breadth of outlook. However, an important part of listening comprehension is found in the search for negative evidence in what we hear.
If we make up our minds to seek out the ideas that might prove us wrong, as well as those that might prove us right, we are less in danger of missing what people have to say. When people in business fail to hear and understand each other, the results can be costly. Such things as numbers, dates, places, and names are especially easy to confuse, but the most straightforward agreements are often subjects of listening errors, too.
When these mistakes are compounded, the resulting cost and inefficiency in business communication become serious. Building awareness of the importance of listening among employees can eliminate a large percentage of this type of aural error. For one thing, it leads to economy of communication. Incidents created by poor listening frequently give businessmen a real fear of oral communication.
As a result, they insist that more and more communication should be put into writing. A great deal of communication needs to be on the record, but the pressure to write is often carried too far. Many times less writing and more speaking would be advisable— if we could plan on good listening. Writing and reading are much slower communication elements than speaking and listening.
They require more personnel, more equipment, and more space than do speaking and listening.
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