Words matter. These are the best Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we’re the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.
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.
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.
I’m baffled all the time. We don’t know what’s driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe.
The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we’re alone in the universe.
I have a personal philosophy in life: If somebody else can do something that I’m doing, they should do it. And what I want to do is find things that would represent a unique contribution to the world – the contribution that only I, and my portfolio of talents, can make happen. Those are my priorities in life.
Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.
The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.
What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That’s not science. You can get a parrot to do that.
Most religious people in America fully embrace science. So the argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small fraction of those who declare that they are religious. They just happen to be a very vocal fraction, so you got the impression that there are more of them than there actually is.
Some asteroids have us in their sights. Be nice to sort of go near them and find out what they’re made of, possibly tag their ears so they’re always broadcasting to us their location. In case one of their trajectories head straight for us, we’ll know well in advance to do something about it.
Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug.
One of the things that fascinates me most is when people are so charmed by the universe that it becomes part of their artistic output.
As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn’t really overturn a science paradigm.
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.
For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.
Whether or not people go into space or serve the space industry, they will have the sensitivity to those fields necessary to stimulate unending innovation in the technological fields, and it’s that innovation in the 21st century that will drive tomorrow’s economies.
Typically, when you look for role models, you want someone who has your interests and came from the same background. Well, look how restricting that is. What people should do is take role models a la carte. If there’s someone whose character you appreciated, you respect that trait.
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.
When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there’s nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy.
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.
Everything we do, every thought we’ve ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.
I never got into ‘Star Wars.’ Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.
Stephen Hawking’s been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood are the ones created by Steven Spielberg – ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ and ‘E.T.,’ for example. All other aliens are trying to suck our brains out.
Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.
If you only think of me during Black History Month, I must be failing as an educator and as an astrophysicist.
Many academicians don’t even own a television, much less watch one.
Every account of a higher power that I’ve seen described, of all religions that I’ve seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.
The history of exploration across nations and across time is not one where nations said, ‘Let’s explore because it’s fun.’ It was, ‘Let’s explore so that we can claim lands for our country, so that we can open up new trade routes; let’s explore so we can become more powerful.’
Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?
As history has shown, pure science research ultimately ends up applying to something. We just don’t know it at the time.
I’m not as famous as Stephen Hawking, but certainly in the U.S., I have a very high profile for a scientist. It is an awesome responsibility, one that I don’t shoulder lightly.
Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or make you give up.
I get enormous satisfaction from knowing I’m doing something for society.
We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.
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.
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.
We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.
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.
I see all this talk about jobs going overseas as a symptom of the absence of innovation. And the absence of innovation is a symptom of there being no major national priority to advance a frontier.
Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That’s a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Although I’m not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story.
I like to believe that science is becoming mainstream. It should have never been something that sort of geeky people do and no one else thinks about. Whether or not, it will always be what geeky people do. It should, as a minimum, be what everybody thinks about because science is all around us.
As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.
The Pacific is the best toilet for satellites.
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.
I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.
