Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

For your own safety, do not ever tell an astrophysicist, I hope all your stars are twinkling.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

I'm optimistic. I see no longer people accepting fuzzy thinking in the world. The change is not that people aren't still saying under-informed things. The change is that if you're in power and you say something under-informed, there are people out there with a voice who will take you to task for having done so

Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion.

You don't want to raise a kid in a culture where the kid who asks the most questions is annoying. You want a culture where the kid who asks the most questions gets awards and gets another piece of cake.

Don't get in the way of children who find it natural and obvious to explore the world around them - even if it means they make a mess of your kitchen or living room. It's all about your perspective on these things. Let them play. When you do, the kids do not have to be reintroduced to ways of questioning nature, and the task of promoting science would be a trivial exercise.

I want people to see that the cosmic perspective is simultaneously honest about the universe we live in and uplifting, when we realize how far we have come and how wonderful is this world of ours.

Merry Christmas to all. A Pagan holiday (BC) becomes a Religious holiday (AD). Which then becomes a Shopping holiday (USA).

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.

I think the best thing a parent can do, when raising a child, is simply get out of their way.

I see myself in pop culture. I listen to pop music, I do pop things, and I'm also a scientist.

Santa knows Physics: Of all colors, Red Light penetrates fog best. That's why Benny the Blue-nosed reindeer never got the gig.

Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance... Something fundamamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understnd.

If aliens did visit us, I'd be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy.

It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle's falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!

When you are a hammer, all of your problems will look like nails to you.

The StarTalks - while kids can watch them, they're actually targeted at adults. Because adults outnumber kids five to one, and adults vote, and adults wield resources, and adults are heads of agencies. So if we're going to affect policy, or affect attitudes, for me, the adults have always been the target population.

You say you're worried about kids? I'm not worried about kids, I'm worried about grown ups... Children are not the problem here... We spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

Here's something that intrigues me: If you have faith, you believe regardless of the evidence, yet if there's ever evidence to support faith, everyone goes to it and points to it.

No doubt, the most challenging class of questions in science is the origin of things.

Thomas Jefferson basically secularized Jesus.

I'm a little fatigued of adults saying we've got to worry about the kids. And these are the same adults that don't know science and are running things and wielding resources and legislation.

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

Science, and its impact on a person's livelihood is the common denominator.

Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.

I can't think that leaving Earth once is enough.

Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.

Science is a fundamental part of our existence.

For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.

You like to explore things, and your parents don't like it because it gets the pots and pans dirty, and because it's noisy - but for you it's fun, you're resting. You're actually doing experiments... Just tell your parents that they're experiments, and you want to become a scientist, and then they won't stop you from doing anything you want.

If it's a new planet, sign me up. I'm tired of driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in orbit around earth-give me a place to go and I'll go.

Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security.

The only accounting we had of the origins and the structure of nature was Biblical Genesis.

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

Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

Let's invent a new tomorrow and then make it happen. Let's invent the city of tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, the transportation of tomorrow.

There are two ways you can receive energy from your environment: One is molecules bumping against you. That's the air. The other is radiative energy. That's what you're feeling from the sun. When they say "Get out of the sun, out of the heat," the air is the same temperature; it's just you're exposed to sunlight.

Your center of mass is a place you cannot visit but you always carry with you. Like memories, it is part of life's baggage.

When I wrestled, I would set aside the time to wrestle, so that in my mind it didn't interfere with my study time. If I'd say, "I'm going to study this many hours, then I'm going to go work out and wrestle," then when that time comes, you don't feel like you should be doing something else. That helped me psychologically. But otherwise? When I'm wrestling, I'm not studying the universe. And when I'm studying the universe, I'm not wrestling.

In astrophysics, we care about how matter, motion and energy manifest in objects and phenomenon in the universe. Stars are born. They live out their lives. They die. Some of the ones that die explode. Our sun will not be one of those, but it will die. And it'll take Earth with us. So we make sure we have other destinations in mind when that happens. And I've got it on my calendar.

I can tell you about the universe, but she feels it; and when you feel the universe, it has a whole other meaning to you. Otherwise, you just put a Wiki page on camera. You can learn something, but it won't mean anything to you later on.

Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine

We still refer to sunrise, sunset. That only has meaning if you think that Earth is in the center of things, and everything is moving around us. So even though we know intellectually Earth goes around the sun, the language is still pre-Copernican, as we would call it.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others... It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

When you're a hammer (as the saying goes), all your problems look like nails. If you're a meteorite expert pondering the sudden extinction of boatloads of species, you'll want to say an impact did it. If you're an igneous petrologist, volcanoes did it. If you're into spaceborne bioclouds, an interstellar virus did it. If you're a hypernova expert, gamma rays did it.

My only hope is that every other alien civilization isn't doing exactly what we are doing because then everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.

God displayed a sense of humor when he configured the region between our legs an entertainment complex built around a sewage system.