Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

By the way, were we to find life-forms on Venus, we would probably call them Venutians, just as people from Mars would be Martians. But according to rules of Latin genitives, to be “of Venus” ought to make you a Venereal. Unfortunately, medical doctors reached that word before astronomers did. Can’t blame them, I suppose. Venereal disease long predates astronomy, which itself stands as only the second oldest profession.

When you're advancing a frontier it stimulates creativity to find solutions.

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun's green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.

Enjoying science shouldn't be rocket science.

If each dead person became a ghost, there'd be more than 100 billion of them haunting us all. Creepy, but cool.

Revelation replaced investigation.

When you innovate, the jobs can't go overseas because other countries haven't figured out how to do it yet.

The world, I think, has too many late-night talk shows.

In whatever you choose to do, do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Math and physics and astrophysics are hard. For every hard thing you accomplish, fewer other people are out there doing the same thing as you. That's what doing something hard means. And in the limit of this, everyone beats a path to your door because you're the only one around who understands the impossible concept or who solves the unsolvable problem.

The school system is constructed to praise you if you get high grades. And if you get straight A's, you're the one that everyone puts forward, and they prognosticate that the straight-A person is the one most likely to succeed, because that's the way the school system is constructed and conceived.

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body...are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically.

You have the illusion of free will, but, in fact, that illusion comes about because you don't know the future. Because you are a prisoner of the present, forever locked in transition, between the past and the future.

Part of knowing how to think is knowing how the laws of nature shape the world around us. Without that knowledge, without that capacity to think, you can easily become a victim of people who seek to take advantage of you.

If an alien lands on your front lawn and extends an appendage as a gesture of greeting, before you get friendly, toss it an eightball. If the appendage explodes, then the alien was probably made of antimatter. If not, then you can proceed to take it to your leader.

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it’s not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people—theologians as well scientists - have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case.

The tenacity of life is mind-boggling. We keep finding it where no one thought it could be.

We only went to the moon for military reasons. The space enthusiasts of the day kept saying, "Oh, we're on the moon; we should be on Mars in ten years." That's if it was driven by exploration, but it's never been driven by exploration.

Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?

What would aliens say when told earthlings shift clocks twice a year to fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight?

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.

As important as the civil rights movement was, I think what will rise to the top is that we left Earth in that time.

The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?

If the people of Comic-Con ruled the world...then tomorrow would be invented every day.

We are star dust in the highest exalted way, called by the universe, reaching out to the universe

America has an economy reversing relative to other nations in the world. And I want to turn that around. And one way I know to turn it around is to get everyone excited about what it is to innovate again.

I think we are all the sum of that which has happened in our lives. And if you're successful, it would be wrong to think that you'd be more successful had something been easier. That's not a given.

Deep down within anyone there's a flame that maybe had gone dormant that can be fanned or ignited in case it had blown out. This is the flame of curiosity, the flame of wonder, of awe, of all the things that make you want to learn something more tomorrow than you knew today.

NASA was invented as a response to Cold War steps. There are those who presumed that we went to the moon because we're explorers. We went to the moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. And so when it became clear that they (Soviet Union) were not going to the moon, we're done with the moon.

Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.

You don't need to be a scientist to know Earth's age or that life evolved. You just need be one who embraces objective truths

Something we all have as kids and is beaten out of us as adults. Parents come up to me, "How do I get my kids interested in science?" They're already interested in science. Just stop beating it out of them.

If you find life on Europa [Jupiter's moon], like, what would you call it? Would it be, like, Europeans?

Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up at the universe; we feel large.

In physics, opinions don't matter, only demonstrated experiments. The day the fellow succeeds, if ever, he won't need anybody else's opinion.

Wanna lose 1200 Calories a month? Drink a liter of ice water a day. You burn the energy just raising the water to body temp.

People think about life from day-to-day rather than thinking about life as something that invents a new kind of tomorrow.

All information is good, even when it is bad.

To view space as, "Well, let's go to Mars now," or "Let's do this now," maybe we should rethink of space as our backyard and have a suite of launch vehicles that can enable any ambition a person has regarding space. It's the same way you can go to buy a car: I want to go offroading, I'll buy this model. I'm a city driver, that's this model. I want to use less fuel, well, that's this model. They're not selling you one car, you have options. So when I think of space, I think of having options.

The history of exploration across nations and across time is not one where nations said, 'Let's explore because it's fun.' It was, 'Let's explore so that we can claim lands for our country, so that we can open up new trade routes; let's explore so we can become more powerful.'

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.

The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation. When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.

Luckily, there are some rocks left over from our earliest days, asteroids formed during our solar system's birth. Occasionally, some of them drop in on Earth, and when they do, they're called meteorites.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

It's my duty to enlighten people.

If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.