Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers.

I like seeing how people have succeeded when others would have presumed they would have failed, and others just go along with whatever everyone else does.

Just before I said I wanted to be an astronomer I said I wanted to be a baseball player. I was quite athletic at the time, probably because I was bigger than other kids, and if you're bigger than other kids and you're 11 you win everything.

The last person I ever want working for me is someone who says 'that's not in my job description.

Science is not there for you to cherry pick ... You can decide whether or not to believe in it but that doesn’t change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.

Newton came up with Newton's laws of motion and gravity. They worked. They were working.

I don't have specific television ambitions in the sense that I remain fundamentally and academic, and so, my innermost ambitions are what's the next discovery I can make; that's in my direct center.

UFO (Unidentified Flying Object)sightings are not higher among amateur astronomers than they are in the general public. In fact, they're lower. You say, why is that so? Well, because we know what the hell we're looking at!

Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.

People put clips of me up. There are quotes from me. I've written books, of course. I'm on Twitter. There are dozens of ways to consume my offerings, and a lecture in a large venue is really only just one of them. So I have no concerns about how much access people would have to me no matter what is the capacity of your pocketbook.

Wow, monitor lizards are pretty gnarly creatures. I want to go with the monitor lizard. That's just weird enough to be true. No?

If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.

Feeling a little small? Well, in the context of the cosmos, we are small.

I'm not as famous as Stephen Hawking, but certainly in the U.S., I have a very high profile for a scientist. It is an awesome responsibility, one that I don't shoulder lightly.

We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that's been proposed.

Not everyone is going to like science as a subject.

We live in the kind of society where, in almost all cases, hard work is rewarded.

Any time we are answer-driven rather than idea driven, we have lost the true meaning of education.

Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.

Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.

Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.

If all that you see, do, measure and discover is the will of a deity, then ideas can never be proven wrong, you have no predictive power, and you are at a loss to understand the principles behind most of the fundamental interconnections of nature.

We fail in even the simplest of all scientific observations-nobody looks up anymore.

The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.

In America, there are people who don't read science fiction but still think about tomorrow, so it's not only the force of science-fiction that makes you a tomorrow thinker.

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.

We still don't know for sure what the trigger was, but since we've discovered meteorites with supernova dust, we do know that a violent explosion rocked our cosmic neighborhood at the time of our birth, and it's quite possible that without it, our stable, stately solar system would never exist at all.

In any case, the leading edge of our "on purpose" radio signals is 30 light-years away and, if intercepted, may mend the aliens' image of us based on the radio bubble of our television shows. But this will happen only if the aliens can somehow determine which type of signal comes closer to the truth of who we are, and what our cosmic identity deserves to be.

I'm not a scientist, I was not a good science student, I felt effectively alienated from science throughout my young life, and it was only when I became an adult that I began to really appreciate from a completely different angle the power of science.

If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist.

Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.

George Bush, within a week of this [the 9/11 attacks], in a speech, attempting to distinguish US from the Muslim fundamentalists, said Our God is the God who named the stars. The problem is: two-thirds of all stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making.

To learn more about science, turn off your electronic device and go outside and look around a bit. Nature is calling you. Go on. The internet will still be here.

Without new economies, our old economies get our jobs taken from them because everyone else has figured out how to do it.

The Earth is just one place of many that we could hang our hats.

This fear factor, this war driver is a very strong one and it's been with the species ever since the beginning and it motivated the Great Wall of China. War can be aggressive or defensive, right? So it motivated the Great Wall of China. Our space program was reactive to Russia.

I have a very high respect for professional comedians. What they do astonishes me. You have to be really smart and absorb everything, repackage it, bring it back to the person, and make them laugh at themselves. I can make people laugh during my talks because they didn't come to have me make them laugh. It's added value. So my job is way easier than that of a professional comic.

On Friday the 13th, April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, we named it Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death.

The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.

We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

If you are that person, you are more likely to believe that God cured you, this invisible force, creator of the universe, cured you, than that you had three idiotic doctors diagnose you. ... I taught physics to pre-med students who became doctors. Not all of them are smart, I assure you.

There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end.

That is a cosmic perspective, that's correct. And in tandem with that, you will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective such as the entire community of astrophysicists leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective, there's this little speck called Earth and you say you're going to do what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what?

With ticket prices, do you ask yourself, why I'm paying $70 to see the arts? You say, "No, that's what the symphony is costing me."

After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?

To get an Emmy nomination for a show that was the first-ever science talk show on television to us was an affirmation that there is an appetite for this content in the mainstream public, not just the erudite public. So we're all completely thrilled by it.

When provoked, the itsy-bitsy invertebrates known as tardigrades can suspend their metabolism. In that state, they can survive temperatures of... 73 K for days on end, making them hardy enough to endure being stranded on Neptune. So the next time you need space travelers with the right stuff, you might want to choose yeast and tardigrades, and leave your astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts at home.

Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.