Pictorial Quotes

Quotes by Astrophysicist

Let’s find a new way to think about the entire taxonomy of solar system objects, and not clutch to this concept of ‘planet,’ which, of course, only ever meant, ‘Do you move against the background stars, regardless of what you’re made of?’

Astrophysicist 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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don’t understand how science works. That’s what I claim. And if they did, they’d be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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When a president promises something beyond his years in office, he is fundamentally unaccountable. It is not his budget that must finish the job. Another president inherits the problem, and it becomes a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The center line of science literacy – which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point – is how you think.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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. That’s what scientists do every day.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The universe is large and old, and the ingredients for life as we know it are everywhere, so there’s no reason to think that Earth would be unique in that regard. Whether of not the life became intelligent is a different question, and we’ll see if we find that.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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As an American, I grew up in an era where we led the world in everything. Everything!

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Let’s say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can’t do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The universe is hilarious! Like, Venus is 900 degrees. I could tell you it melts lead. But that’s not as fun as saying, ‘You can cook a pizza on the windowsill in nine seconds.’ And next time my fans eat pizza, they’re thinking of Venus!

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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If you slid Pluto to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail. Now that’s no kind of behavior for a planet.

Astrophysicist 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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won’t. Especially not astrophysicists – we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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When an industry matures, it means it’s not advancing, and of course the jobs go overseas. That’s the obligation of the multi-national corporation: to put the factory where it can make the widget as cheap as possible. Don’t get angry when a corporation does that; we’ve all bought into this concept. We live in a capitalistic society.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Any time scientists disagree, it’s because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I’m right, or you’re right, or we’re both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate, it’s not simply, ‘Do you know what DNA is? Or what the Big Bang is?’ That’s an aspect of science literacy. The biggest part of it is do you know how to think about information that’s presented in front of you.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations – as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The first trillionaire in the world will be the person who mines asteroids.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There’s eight.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The Pacific is the best toilet for satellites.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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It may be that our cosmic curiosity… is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet. Once you investigate that, you find out that Disney’s dog Pluto was sketched the same year the cosmic object was discovered. And Pluto was discovered by an American.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I’m perennially intrigued how people who lead largely evidence-based lives can, in a belief-based part of their mind, be certain that an invisible, divine entity created an entire universe just for us, or that the government is stockpiling space aliens in a secret desert location.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have scientific literacy in topics that matter for future political issues.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The only way you can invent tomorrow is if you break out of the enclosure that the school system has provided for you by the exams written by people who are trained in another generation.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Being at the top of your game intellectually, philosophically, politically, is not a forever thing.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there’s a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown, lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we’re tackling these mysteries one by one. If you’re going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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When you put money directly to a problem, it makes a good headline. It makes a good campaign slogan. You get to claim that you’ve engaged in these activities within an election cycle. But certain investments take longer than an election cycle.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Fortunately, there’s another handy driver that has manifested itself throughout the history of cultures. The urge to want to gain wealth. That is almost as potent a driver as the urge to maintain your security. And that is how I view NASA going forward – as an investment in our economy.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I was an aspiring astrophysicist, and that’s how I defined myself, not by my skin color. People didn’t treat me as someone with science ambitions. They treated me as someone they thought was going to mug them, or who was a shoplifter.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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No astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life. I think we’re not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another planet. Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a live one!

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist 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!’

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I study the universe. It’s the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I’ve spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I’m an academic. Being an academic means I don’t wield power over person, place or thing. I don’t command armies; I don’t lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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If you think of feelings you have when you are awed by something – for example, knowing that elements in your body trace to exploded stars – I call that a spiritual reaction, speaking of awe and majesty, where words fail you.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.

Astrophysicist 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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. I kind of want to know what happened there because we’re twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it. Mars once had running water. It’s bone dry today. Something bad happened there as well.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I don’t want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We’d be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Scientists in different disciplines don’t speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It’s like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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My parents didn’t know much science; in fact, they didn’t know science at all. But they could recognize a science book when they saw it, and they spent a lot of time at bookstores, combing the remainder tables for science books to buy for me. I had one of the biggest libraries of any kid in school, built on books that cost 50 cents or a dollar.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Just think for how long humanity was controlled by mystical, magical thinking – the diseases and suffering that led to. We managed to survive, but just barely. It wasn’t pretty.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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What you need, above all else, is a love for your subject, whatever it is. You’ve got to be so deeply in love with your subject that when curve balls are thrown, when hurdles are put in place, you’ve got the energy to overcome them.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I’ve been a minimalist my whole life, even if you wouldn’t know it from my office.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I always try to get people a different outlook. When you do that, people take ownership of the information. They don’t ever have to reference me because, I’d like to believe as an educator, I’m empowering them to have those thoughts themselves.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I want people to see that the cosmic perspective is simultaneously honest about the universe we live in and uplifting, when we realize how far we have come and how wonderful is this world of ours.

Astrophysicist 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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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There is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying, ‘I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let’s go test that prediction,’ and have the prediction be correct.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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To make any future that we dreamt up real requires creative scientists, engineers, and technologists to make it happen. If people are not within your midst who dream about tomorrow – with the capacity to bring tomorrow into the present – then the country might as well just recede back into the cave because that’s where we’re headed.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Everyone should have their mind blown once a day.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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While I’m a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it’s the real universe that calls to me.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You can’t come away with this cosmic perspective thinking that you are better than others and want to fight. That’s why you’ll never have astrophysicists leading nations into war.

Astrophysicist 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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I don’t know anybody who said, ‘I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,’ or ‘Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.’ That’s not what people want to talk about. It’s not what influences people in one profession or another.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The cross pollination of disciplines is fundamental to truly revolutionary advances in our culture.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, ‘Oh, let’s build a robot’ and what’s the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That’s so 1950s. We are so past that.

Astrophysicist 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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we’re toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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It’s actually the minority of religious people who rejects science or feel threatened by it or want to sort of undo or restrict the… where science can go. The rest, you know, are just fine with science. And it has been that way ever since the beginning.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I’m often asked – and occasionally in an accusatory way – ‘Are you atheist?’ And it’s like, ‘You know, the only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist, all right?’ I don’t associate with movements. I’m not an ‘ism.’ I just – I think for myself.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist 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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.’

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I can’t gather around and talk about how much everybody in the room doesn’t believe in God. I just don’t – I don’t have the energy for that, and so I… Agnostic separates me from the conduct of atheists whether or not there is strong overlap between the two categories, and at the end of the day I’d rather not be any category at all.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it’s the brain wiring that I’m more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that’s been proposed.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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There’s a lot to do in space. I want to learn more about the greenhouse effect on Venus, about whether there was life on Mars, about the environment in which Earth and the Sun is immersed, the behavior of the Sun.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I said that if an alien came to visit, I’d be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They’d be like, ‘What?’

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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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.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You can’t train kids in a world where adults have no concept of what science literacy is. The adults are gonna squash the creativity that would manifest itself, because they’re clueless about what it and why it matters. But science can always benefit from the more brains there are that are thinking about it – but that’s true for any field.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
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