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Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up at the universe; we feel large.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Those who see the cosmic perspective as a depressing outlook, they really need to reassess how they think about the world. Because when I look up in the universe, I know I'm small but I'm also big. I'm big because I'm connected to the universe, and the universe is connected to me.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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!'
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.)
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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We live on this speck called Earth - think about what you might do, today or tomorrow - and make the most of it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The need to create a new taxonomy that isn't just applying to our own solar system will become so evident and apparent that something will come out of it. I'm sure of it, even if it's not tomorrow.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I'm on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they believe, the science is more extraordinary than anything they can invent.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The only driver stronger than an economic argument to do something is the war argument, the I-don't-want-to-die argument.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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If we find life out there, and it's not us, we will deem it not intelligent. But what may be equally as likely is that we find life that's vastly more intelligent than we are. If that's the case, we are putty in their hands.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I don't comment on the physics errors of 'Star Wars,' all right. I just - you let that one go.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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All tweets are tasty. Any tweet anybody writes is tasty. So, I try to have each tweet not simply be informative, but have some outlook, some perspective that you might not otherwise had.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
