Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
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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.
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I claim that space is part of our culture. You've heard complaints that nobody knows the names of the astronauts, that nobody gets excited about launches, that nobody cares anymore except people in the industry. I don't believe that for a minute.
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I've been a minimalist my whole life, even if you wouldn't know it from my office.
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If you think of feelings you have when you are awed by something - for example, knowing that elements in your body trace to exploded stars - I call that a spiritual reaction, speaking of awe and majesty, where words fail you.
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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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Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. 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.
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All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet.
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Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or make you give up.
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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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Let me tell you something about full moons: kids don't care about full moons. They'll play in a full moon, no worries at all. They only get scared of magic or werewolves from stupid adults and their stupid adult stories.
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I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know.
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All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There's eight.
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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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Some of the most productive times in the histories of nations have been when they were badly stressed - economically, politically, culturally or socially. It's possible to be stressed to a point that more creativity is stimulated than would otherwise be the case. I think it is true that necessity is the mother of invention.
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Just think for how long humanity was controlled by mystical, magical thinking - the diseases and suffering that led to. We managed to survive, but just barely. It wasn't pretty.
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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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Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.
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'Boldly going where hundreds have gone before' does not make headlines.
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If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.
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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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One of the symptoms of an absence of innovation is the fact that you lose your jobs. Everyone else catches up with you. They can do what you do better than you or cheaper than you. And in a multinational corporate-free market enterprise, it is the company's obligation to take the factory to a place where they can make it more cheaply.
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There's something about witnessing something in the sky that makes people think they're seeing something unique or special. I don't really understand the psychology of it, to be honest.
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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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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!'