Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
-
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!'
-
Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth.
-
Big ideas, big ambitious projects need to be embedded within culture at a level deeper than the political winds. It needs to be deeper than the economic fluctuations that could turn people against an expensive project because they're on an unemployment line and can't feed their families.
-
Pluto's orbit is so elongated that it crosses the orbit of another planet. Now that's... you've got no business doing that if you want to call yourself a planet. Come on, now! There's something especially transgressive about that.
-
Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.
-
As an American, I grew up in an era where we led the world in everything. Everything!
-
The idea that science is just some luxury that you'll get around to if you can afford it is regressive to any future a country might dream for itself.
-
People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.
-
Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher, to student, to teacher. A community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars. (From the first Cosmos: ASO episode, Standing Up in the Milky Way.)
-
You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.
-
The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought.
-
If you start wielding a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. And maybe they’re not. Maybe it's more subtle than that. And so your toolkit has to be able to morph into what is necessary for what it is that you confront at that moment.
-
'Cosmos' is an occasion to bring everything that I have, all of my capacity to communicate. We may go to the edge of the universe, but we're going to land right on you: in your heart, in your soul, in your mind. My goal is to have people know that they are participants in this great unfolding cosmic story.
-
Every day, I wake up and I say, 'Why... how... did I end up with 1.7 million Twitter followers?' It's freaky to me, every day, but that tells me that there's an appetite out there that had previously been underserved. There's an inner geek in us all, an inner bit of curiosity that people are discovering, and they like it.
-
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
-
Knowing how things work is important, but I think that's an incomplete view of what science literacy is or, at least, should be. Science literacy is an outlook. It's more of a lens through which you observe what goes on around you.
-
We live on this speck called Earth - think about what you might do, today or tomorrow - and make the most of it.
-
I can't tell you how many people say they were turned off from science because of a science teacher that completely sucked out all the inspiration and enthusiasm they had for the course.
-
In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.
-
For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn't just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.
-
Words that make questions may not be questions at all.
-
I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.
-
In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' by van Gogh.
-
If you're going to lead a space frontier, it has to be government; it'll never be private enterprise. Because the space frontier is dangerous, and it's expensive, and it has unquantified risks. And under those conditions, you cannot establish a capital-market evaluation of that enterprise. You can't get investors.