Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
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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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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'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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I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.
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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.
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Many academicians don't even own a television, much less watch one.
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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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There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.
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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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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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In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.
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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.
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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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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.
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All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There's eight.
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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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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.
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'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.
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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.
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I'm often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period.
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No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles.
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As an American, I grew up in an era where we led the world in everything. Everything!
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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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We have bred multiple generations of people who have not experienced knowing where you are the moment a news story broke, with that news story being great and grand and something that elevates society instead of diminishes it.