Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

“Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.”

“Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution.”

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”

“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”

“I don’t have an issue with what you do in the church, but I’m gonna be up in your face if you’re gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me they’ve got to teach what you’re teaching in your Sunday school. Because that’s when we’re gonna fight!”

“I love the smell of the universe in the morning.”

“I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.”

“I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime.”

“If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.”

“Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.”

“It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what's really there.”

“Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults.”

“Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.”

“My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.”

“Our academic system rewards people who know a lot of stuff and generally we call those people smart, but at the end of the day who do you want – the person who can figure things out that they've never seen before or the person who can rattle off a bunch of facts?”

“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.”

“People like death and mayhem.”

“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life.

So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”

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

“Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.”

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

“The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock.

The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.”

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

“We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.”

“When students cheat on exams it's because our school system values grades more than students value learning.”

“Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination.”

“Whether or not you can never become great at something, you can always become better at it. Don't ever forget that! And don’t say: I’ll never be good.

You can become better and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.”

“After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.”

“People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.”