"Can you think of a task more difficult that the one assigned to me. It is not responsibility to a single person, or dozens of people, or even a collective. It is responsibility to all Soviet people, to all mankind, to its present and its future. And if I am nevertheless venturing on this flight, it is because I am a Communist, because I draw strength from unexampled exploits performed by my compatriots, Soviet men and women. I know that I shall muster all my will power the better to do the job. Realising its importance, I will do all I can to carry out the assignment of the Communist Party and the Soviet people."
"I would like to dedicate this first space flight to the people of communism, a society which our Soviet people are already entering, and which, I am confident, all men on earth will enter."
"Many people are interested in my biography. I have read in a newspaper that some irresponsible persons in the United States of America, who are distant relatives of the Gagarins princes and think that I am one of their offsprings. I have to disillusion them. I am a simple Soviet man. I was born 9 March 1934, to the family of a collective farmer. The place of my birth: Smolensk region, Gzhatsk district, the village of Klushino. I’ve never heard and don’t know any princes or nobility in my family tree. Before the revolution my parents were poor peasants. The older generation of my family, my grandfather and grandmother, were also poor peasants."
"Someone calculated that the power of the rocket engines, which put the red-star “Vostok” into orbit, was equal to the combined power of the entire horse population of pre-revolutionary Russia. This coincidence, although witty, is sad. A country of backwardness and despotism, such as tsarist Russia, could not have escaped into space. To ascend to the stars, it is not enough to break the fetters of gravity - it was first necessary to throw off the shackles in which labor, reason, and human soul languished before October! It was not for nothing that the Communards were called “people storming the sky”. The storming of space did not begin on 12 April 1961, when man saw the open universe, and not even on 4 October 1957, when the first satellite took off from the Earth. It all started with the Aurora shot, with the storming of the Winter Palace."
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