If there's something that someone else can do, let them do it. If I couldn't do it uniquely, let someone else do it and I would get back to the lab.

If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

Einstein's theory, we know that it fails. In advance, we know it fails. So that a deeper understanding of nature is awaiting us.

A successful day for me is when I teach people something. They become enlightened by an idea and learn how to think about it, so that later on when someone says, "Tell me about x, y, z," they don't have to say, "I know this because Tyson told me." No, they'll say, "Here's why it's true because I know and understand it."

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.

Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.