Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
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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.
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There's a lot to do in space. I want to learn more about the greenhouse effect on Venus, about whether there was life on Mars, about the environment in which Earth and the Sun is immersed, the behavior of the Sun.
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It's part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.
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You have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not. And I don't mind if you're not scientifically literate, but just admit that to yourself, so that you'll know, and perhaps you can take a first step to try to eradicate that.
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The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.
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What people are really after is, what is my stance on religion or spirituality or God? And I would say, if I find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic.
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Adults, who outnumber kids four or five to one, are in charge. We wield the resources, run the world, and completely thwart kids' creativity.
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I've spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I'm an academic. Being an academic means I don't wield power over person, place or thing. I don't command armies; I don't lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought.
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Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
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'Cosmos' wouldn't deserve its place in primetime evening network television were it not a landscape on which compelling stories were told. People, when they watch TV in the evening, want to see stories, and science simply tells the best stories.
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No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.
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Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.
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I'm constantly claimed by atheists. I find this intriguing. In fact, on my Wiki page - I didn't create the Wiki page, others did, and I'm flattered that people cared enough about my life to assemble it - and it said, 'Neil deGrasse is an atheist.'
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There is always a place I can take someone's curiosity and land where they end up enlightened when we're done. That's my challenge as an educator. No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.
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The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.
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For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.
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We live in the kind of society where, in almost all cases, hard work is rewarded.
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Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.
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You don't take a dead cat to the vet. I mean you might, but why?
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I want to know what dark matter and dark energy are comprised of. They remain a mystery, a complete mystery. No one is any closer to solving the problem than when these two things were discovered.
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Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions.
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Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.
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Stephen Hawking's been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood are the ones created by Steven Spielberg - 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'E.T.,' for example. All other aliens are trying to suck our brains out.
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We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'