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The only way you can invent tomorrow is if you break out of the enclosure that the school system has provided for you by the exams written by people who are trained in another generation.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I study the universe. It's the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
When a president promises something beyond his years in office, he is fundamentally unaccountable. It is not his budget that must finish the job. Another president inherits the problem, and it becomes a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Innovations in science and technology are the engines of the 21st-century economy; if you care about the wealth and health of your nation tomorrow, then you'd better rethink how you allocate taxes to fund science. The federal budget needs to recognize this.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
The universe is large and old, and the ingredients for life as we know it are everywhere, so there's no reason to think that Earth would be unique in that regard. Whether of not the life became intelligent is a different question, and we'll see if we find that.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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To make any future that we dreamt up real requires creative scientists, engineers, and technologists to make it happen. If people are not within your midst who dream about tomorrow - with the capacity to bring tomorrow into the present - then the country might as well just recede back into the cave because that's where we're headed.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
It turns out our brain is sensitive, maybe too sensitive, to motion. It's a survival mechanism.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
There are a lot of things you can do in space, and space essentially is unlimited resources. We are climbing over ourselves here looking for the next source of energy. The universe has an unlimited source of energy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
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 -
I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You can't train kids in a world where adults have no concept of what science literacy is. The adults are gonna squash the creativity that would manifest itself, because they're clueless about what it and why it matters. But science can always benefit from the more brains there are that are thinking about it - but that's true for any field.
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?
Neil deGrasse Tyson -
The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end.
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