Best Neil Degrasse Quotes & Sayings

The Pacific is the best toilet for satellites. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you're surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I think the best thing a parent can do, when raising a child, is simply get out of their way. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The most successful scientists in the history of the world are those who posed the right questions — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

UV is bad for molecules because its high energy breaks the bonds between a molecule's constituent atoms. That's why UV is bad for you, too: it's always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Any time we are answer-driven rather than idea driven, we have lost the true meaning of education. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes ... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642 — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

It's the great tragedy - people employed in ways that don't fully tap everything they do best in life. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

There are no articles any more that dream about the cities of tomorrow. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In particular, a quantity known as the fine-structure constant, which controls the basic fingerprinting for every element, must have remained unchanged for billions of years. Of — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In life and in the universe it's always best to keep looking up. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Aliens might be surprised to learn that in a cosmos with limitless starlight, humans kill for energy sources buried in the sand — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

[A]s they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion ... Although just as in hostage negotiations, it's probably best to keep both sides talking to each other. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective such as the entire community of astrophysicists leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective, there's this little speck called Earth and you say you're going to do what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The universe is so amazing and so limitless, who wouldn't want to study the universe? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus the other. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The National Air and Space Museum is unlike any other place on this planet. If you're hosting visitors from another country and they want to know what single museum best captures what it is to be American, this is the museum you take them to. Here they can see the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1927 Spirit of St. Louis, the 1926 Goddard rocket, and the Apollo 11 command module - silent beacons of exploration, of a few people willing to risk their lives for the sake of discovery. Without — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Santa knows Physics: Of all colors, Red Light penetrates fog best. That's why Benny the Blue-nosed reindeer never got the gig. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The best colleges admit only successful students, offering no evidence the college itself forged the students' late success. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. ... If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can't help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you'll be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, "Don't you need a vacation?!," and you don't even know what the word "vacation" means because what you're doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation - that's the state of mind of somebody who's doing what others might call visionary and brilliant. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

One trait stands out in nearly all meteorites: metal; they've got it. So, the best way to find a meteorite is to hear it first. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

'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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

iridium is one of the three heaviest (densest) elements on the Table - two cubic feet of it weighs as much as a Buick, which makes iridium one of the world's best paperweights, able to defy all known office fans. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Dear Merlin, How empty is empty space? ARTHUR LEVY HOUSTON, TEXAS When a rabbit disappears into "thin air" at a magic show nobody tells you the thin air already contains over 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quintillion) atoms per cubic centimeter. The very best laboratory vacuum chambers have as few as 10,000 atoms per cubic centimeter. Interplanetary space gets down to about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter while interstellar space is as low as 0.5 atoms per cubic centimeter. The award for nothingness, however, must be given to intergalactic space. There it is difficult to find more than 0.0000001 atoms per cubic centimeter. It has been postulated that outside the universe, where there is no space, there is no nothing. We might call this hypothetical region (where we are certain to find multitudes of rabbits) nothing-nothing — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

For reasons I have yet to understand, many people don't like chemicals, which might explain the perennial movement to rid foods of them. Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

Merlin prefers to think of space as the regions between all the particles of all the atoms of the universe. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

And what happens when you stop innovating? Everyone else catches up, your jobs go overseas, and then you cry foul: Ooohh, they're paying them less over there, and the playing field is not level. Well, stop whining and start innovating. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

Curious fact that those who never fail are also those who never truly succeed. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We're talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos.
Have a nice day. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Science is not a subject you took in school. It's life. We are wrapped by it, in it, with it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The exact orbit of Earth is controlled by the Sun's mass and the mass of all remaining planets. An object's mass and its distance is all we need to know to completely determine the effects of its gravity on Earth. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I think on some level, role models are overrated If you require a role model who looks just like you to be something you wanna be and you can't find one, is that a reason to not be what you wanna be? No! — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

But to measure cause and effect ... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The telescope ... is a conduit to the cosmos. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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! — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Something we all have as kids and is beaten out of us as adults. Parents come up to me, "How do I get my kids interested in science?" They're already interested in science. Just stop beating it out of them. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The tenacity of life is mind-boggling. We keep finding it where no one thought it could be. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We fail in even the simplest of all scientific observations-nobody looks up anymore. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

The urge to want some bit of information to be true often clouds our ability to assess why that information may be false. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Like a snowplow in overdrive, a supernova shockwave might sweep away any gas clouds in its path. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

Why can't Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn't exist then they don't have a favorite planet. Right? Please write back but not in cursive because I can't read cursive. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Companies want to innovate. Companies that don't innovate wither on the vine. The connection between STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the financial stability of a nation is what needs to established. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I want upon death to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so ... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Wanna lose 1200 Calories a month? Drink a liter of ice water a day. You burn the energy just raising the water to body temp. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Science depends on organized skepticism, that is, on continual, methodical doubting. Few of us doubt our own conclusions, so science embraces its skeptical approach by rewarding those who doubt someone else's. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson