Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

I knew my interest in the universe and I owned a telescope that I bought with money I earned by walking dogs. 50 cents per walk, per dog, and that accumulated quickly. I bought a camera, a telescope. I taught myself astrophotography. I did all this.

The universe's destiny has very little to do with the near-term destiny of Earth.

Whether or not you can become great at something, you can always become better.

This universe knows about me and my crops.

I have thoughts every day that are themselves tweets.

The universe for me was other planets and other star systems and other galaxies. I enjoyed tracking it, but it had no specific influence on my ambitions for that reason. It wasn't really far enough away from Earth to matter to me.

With no gravitational force to work against, your body not only doesn't need the same amount of muscle and bone, it starts breaking them down. As on Earth, so in space: use it or lose it. And exercise may not solve the problem.

But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment.

The people talking on their cell phone and following GPS instructions to where grandma's house is saying I don't need space - excuse me, that's how you know where grandma lives, and when to make the left turn.

We're talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

If you seek only easy problems to solve, then ultimately, there'll be nothing about you to distinguish yourself from others.

If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.

I don't ever tell people what to do! Even if it seems and feels that way sometimes, I don't think I should tell a person how to spend their money. I try not to tell people what to read.

I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.

The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

It'd be a shame to talk about the universe and not show some images of it, because we have some of the more stunning representations of our field relative to any of the sciences. But I don't use the imagery as a substitute for the insights and wisdom I can convey so that when you leave you say to yourself, "Wow, I'm a little more deeply connected to the universe, and I want to learn more."

I try to keep this in mind when tied in to a rope 75 feet up in a tree... The history of ideas about our place in the universe has been a long series of let-downs for those who like to believe we are special.

There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.

If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.

On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642

When you innovate, you create new industries that then boost your economy. And when you create new industries and that becomes part of your culture, your jobs can't go overseas because no one else has figured out how to do it yet.

I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them.

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults.

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

Modern science is under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of your five senses.

when I wrestled, I would set aside the time to wrestle, so that in my mind it didn't interfere with my study time. That helped me psychologically. When I'm wrestling, I'm not studying the universe. And when I'm studying the universe, I'm not wrestling.

Climate change has taken on political dimensions. That's odd because I don't see people choosing sides over E=Mc2 or other fundamental facts of science.

UV is bad for molecules because its high energy breaks the bonds between a molecule's constituent atoms. That's why UV is bad for you, too: it's always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh.

If you're interested in something, that's all that matters. You'll spend more time doing it, that than anything else, and possibly more time doing it than anybody else.

You can deceive yourself into thinking that America is a technological leader, but if you don't see what anyone else is doing you have no accurate assessment - you can't make an accurate assessment of where you fit and why. I consider our moving frontier in space as the anecdote to that downward trend.

We should not measure our space-faring era by where footprints have been laid.... We should measure our era by how many people take no notice at all. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment.

For decades, we've been trying to cook up the building blocks of life, in the lab, and recreate the origins of it all, but the parts didn't seem to fit together, until now.

Typically, when you look for role models, you want someone who has your interests and came from the same background. Well, look how restricting that is. What people should do is take role models a la carte. If there's someone whose character you appreciated, you respect that trait.

I'd go back and hang out with Isaac Newton. I'm torn between do I hang out with him or do I bring him into the present to hang out with me. See, that might be terrifying because his head will just explode once he sees everything that was derived from his discoveries, but I'd spend more time with someone who I think is one of the most brilliant minds our species has ever known.

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

I remain fearless of airplanes after 9/11. But during a trip to Los Angeles on a Boeing 767, I couldn't keep my mind from drifting: What's the largest piece of this airplane that could crash into the World Trade Center, explode out the other side, and survive intact? The landing gear? My computer battery? My belt buckle? My wedding ring?

FM signals and those of broadcast television...travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).

As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.

If cosmological theory were dominated by women, who are no strangers to cycles, how can we know for sure that we wouldn't then be told that the oscillating universe is the more aesthetically fulfilling alternative?

The trend lines in research and innovation look good for places such as India and China and less good for America as we go forward. So even if you're not enchanted by the prospect of cosmic discovery, the prospect of dying poor may be what it takes to understand the role of this adventure in the future of the natural world in which we live.

Anyone who has wrestled knows that it's the hardest thing in the world to do. Anyone who says something else is the hardest thing has never wrestled. That's what I have found. ... You don't wrestle because it's easy, you wrestle because it's hard. I don't do astrophysics because it's easy, I do it because it's hard. And I juxtapose the two in my mind, body, and soul all the time.

In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.