Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

If your ego starts out, 'I am important, I am big, I am special,' you're in for some disappointments...

If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were b...

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call th...

... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifti...

... and I submit to you, that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not b...

The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values ...

When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not h...

You could also ask who’s in charge. Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelli...

There’s a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about, called “argument ...

I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard—explored not only wi...

Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for th...

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more of...

But you can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the ...

If you're going to lead a space frontier, it has to be government; it'll never be private enterprise...

I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Unive...

The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, ar...

Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life i...

Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe bu...

Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay d...

We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus...

In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got ca...

How do we change the way science is taught?Ask anybody how many teachers truly made a difference in ...

You know that passage in the Bible that says, “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”? Always wondere...

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat th...

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like ...

I think the greatest of people in society carved niches that represented the unique expression of th...

If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into ...

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as vis...

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once wa...

There are more stolen bikes in my garage than there are stars in the galaxy.

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we c...

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent for...

I'm often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I...

To learn that it's easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for you...

When we see animals doing remarkable things, how do we know if we're simply seeing tricks or signs o...

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliab...

The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents ...

I can't tell you how many people say they were turned off from science because of a science teacher ...

These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance i...

You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illitera...

If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could beg...

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter,...

...people taking the time and energy to ask about what they do not understand - I have renewed hope ...

If the universe is anything, it should be fun.

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space...

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behav...

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If i...

In our profession, we tend to name things exactly as we see them. Big red stars we call red giants. ...

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.

If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we're tackling these mysteries one by one. I...

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to ta...

You can't train kids in a world where adults have no concept of what science literacy is. The adults...

The urge to want some bit of information to be true often clouds our ability to assess why that info...

I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.

For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn't just big...

The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of ...

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in ...

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate, it's not simply, 'Do you know what DNA is? Or what...

I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained w...

If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person’s body, and tied them end-to-end...

The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I...

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of huma...

Don’t know if it’s good or bad that a Google search on “Big Bang Theory” lists the sitcom before the...

The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them...

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

Stephen Hawking's been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood...

Although I'm not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies mad...

A bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same heigh...

I fear living a life where I could have accomplished something and didn't. That's what I fear. I don...

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked w...

I claim that space is part of our culture. You've heard complaints that nobody knows the names of th...

Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors,...

We live in the kind of society where, in almost all cases, hard work is rewarded.

Whether or not people go into space or serve the space industry, they will have the sensitivity to t...

There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have ...

I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or ...

Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolutio...

Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of oth...

Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practic...

On Friday the 13th of April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were a...

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't ...

I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that's hard to do for a cit...

There are a lot of things you can do in space, and space essentially is unlimited resources. We are ...

In some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the e...

In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you're surrou...

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reactio...

Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or mak...

I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject Go...

Typically, when you look for role models, you want someone who has your interests and came from the ...

Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everyth...

We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to s...

Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.

We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We star...

I'm on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they bel...

Science literacy is an important part of what it is to be an informed citizen of society.

Perhaps we've never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there's n...

Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It's not possible because a space frontier is ex...

Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.