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There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
The humblest person in this world is the astrophysicist. Because we are face to face with our ignorance every single day.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
The cross pollination of disciplines is fundamental to truly revolutionary advances in our culture.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
That makes me want to grab people on the street and say, 'have you heard this?'
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
People credit me for making the universe interesting when in fact the universe is inherently interesting, and I'm merely revealing that fact. I don't think I'm anything special for this to happen.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
It's the great tragedy - people employed in ways that don't fully tap everything they do best in life.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
I always try to get people a different outlook. When you do that, people take ownership of the information. They don't ever have to reference me because, I'd like to believe as an educator, I'm empowering them to have those thoughts themselves.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that's hard to do for a city kid because when you look up you just see buildings - and really, your first thought is to look in people's windows. So to look out of the space - out of living space - and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
No astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life. I think we're not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another planet. Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a live one!
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
We didn't build the interstate system to connect New York to Los Angeles because the West Coast was a priority. No, we webbed the highways so people can go to multiple places and invent ways of doing things not thought of by the persons building the roads.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.
Neil deGrasse Tyson