Top 154 Quotes & Sayings by Bill Nye - Page 2

As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often, 'When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.’ And I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science. It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I’ve never seen before. It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself.

For me, the meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future.

Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There's something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym.

SCIENCE is a part of EVERYONE'S everyday life.

Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth.

Recommending or insisting on abstinence has been completely ineffective.

I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling.

It is my mission to change the world. I'm not kidding: Make no small plans, dream mighty things. I feel if we get enough people engaged in climate change, we will get enough people to change the world. We will revolutionize the way we produce electricity and provide clean water to people.

If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else...

I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.

That's what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.

I tell personal stories associated with aspects of the theory, and I hope they are interesting and compelling. I don't feel you're going to change a grownup's mind in one reading. People have to be exposed to scientific ideas over and over again for years. It's also not a textbook.

Along with the evidence of common sense, researchers have proven scientifically that humans are all one people. We're a lot like dogs in that regard. If a Great Dane interacts (can we say interact?) with a Chihuahua, you get a dog.

Science provides a much more satisfactory way to seek answers than does any religion.

Talk about science with everyone you meet. Especially talk about climate change. It needs to become a part of our everyday conversation (the way it is everywhere else in the world).

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.

How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?

What happens to other species also happens to us.

We should educate more women and girls. Because that is the surest route to controllably, manageably reducing the human population. Educated women have fewer kids. And the kids they do have are better cared for and are more successful. As I like to say, it's not one thing that we need to focus on. It's everything all at once.

I just want to remind us all there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious, who get enriched by the wonderful sense of community by their religion. But these same people do not embrace the extraordinary view that the Earth is somehow only 6,000 years old.

The natural world is a package deal; you don't get to select which facts you like and which you don't.

I speak with dogs frequently. They don't really talk, but I feel they're communicating.

When we explore the cosmos, we come to believe and prove that we can solve problems that have never been solved. It brings out the best in us. Space exploration imbues everyone with an optimistic view of the future.

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change. All of these people breathing and burning our atmosphere has led to an extraordinarily dangerous situation. I hope next generation will emerge and produce technology, regulations, and a worldview that enable as many of us as possible to live happy healthy lives.

I try to speak plainly and be sympathetic to the idea of religions where people gather in community. They get a sense of people looking out for each other. My claim is that we have a tendency to look out for each other whether or not there is a religion involved.

If you meet somebody who says he or she has never dreamed of flying, I don't believe you. I mean, they're lying.

People and stars are made of the same stuff.

Some of the most wonderful aspects and consequences of evolution have been discovered only recently. This is in stark contrast to creationism, which offers a static view of the world, one that cannot be challenged or tested with reason. And because it cannot make predictions, it cannot lead to new discoveries, new medicines, or new ways to feed all of us.

I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that's completely inconsistent with the world we observe, that's fine. But don't make your kids do it. Because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems.

By the way, most of the light that comes from the sun is green.

There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as "we"; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm.

The philosophy of science is inherent in the process. This is to say, you think critically, you draw a conclusion based on evidence, but we all pursue discovery based on our observations. That's where science starts.

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we’re here. And that’s astonishing. And that we can understand that, that’s the most astonishing.

We need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.

We are special in the sense that we can know our place in the cosmos. We can know our place in space. We are at least one of the cosmos's ways of knowing itself. That fills me with reverence and joy. Another insight I really want people to consider is this: everyone has gotten this far. Everyone you meet has made it this far. Nobody is superior to anyone else from an evolutionary standpoint.

Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.

From an evolutionary standpoint you can't just wipe everything out and start over, and I don't think you can do it in the school system either.

The US Navy has several people on every ship that can navigate by the stars. They don't fool with that.

There are two ways to be rich: to have more or need less. It's estimated that we squander about 30 percent of our energy leaving the lights on, the refrigerator door open, and so on. Then there is the enormous amount of food that we expend huge amounts of energy to raise and then throw away.

America has had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.

If we raise a generation of students who dont believe in the process of science, who think everything that weve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, youre not going to continue to innovate.

The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It's not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.

There is no debate in the scientific community...We need [Congress] to change things, not to deny what's happening.

Not wasting any water bottles is good. Not leaving the lights on is good. Turning the thermostat down in the winter, up in the summer, is good. But the best thing any of us in the developed world, especially in the United States, can be doing is talking about it.

There are two questions that get to us all: Are we alone in the Universe? And, where did we come from? For me, science provides a much more satisfactory way to seek answers than does any religion I've come across. With that said, the universe is mysterious and wonderful. It fills me with reverence for nature and our place among the stars; our place in space.

I abandoned my religious teachings after I read the Bible twice - cover to cover. It took me a couple of years.

But as the cerebellum degrades with age, so does the quality of memories. The memories are there, but they're not as good.

Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science. Every question it raises leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself. It is also the most meaningful creation story that humans have ever found.

No matter what you may believe spiritually or otherwise, the Earth is clearly not 6,000 or 10,000 years old.

I say to the grown-ups, 'If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we've observed in the universe that's fine. But don't make your kids do it.'

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change.

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That's just crazy.

If you just take a single human and put him or her in the forest he or she might not do very well without some sort of education which he got or she got from some tribe.

Climate change is a real deal. So, hey deniers - cut it out, and let's get to work.

Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal.

The thing about a theory in science is it allows you make predictions. Evolutionary theory allows us to predict what apples will taste good next harvest.

Incidentally, the creationists that I've encountered diligently deny that our Earth's climate is being altered by people. This point of view and teaching is in absolutely no one's best interest. Here's hoping we can work together and preserve the Earth, for us - us humans.

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don't have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling - sidewaysers.