Top 896 Quotes & Sayings by Neil deGrasse Tyson - Page 13

Newton came up with Newton's laws of motion and gravity. They worked. They were working.

Access to science is greater than ever before. There are more vehicles out there that grant the public access to science. Not to mention the Internet.

Not everyone is going to like science as a subject.

This universe knows about me and my crops.

Whatever I am, I'm not as bad as the person that read the novel before watching the film. I'll enjoy whatever they [producers] are putting in front of me. If they made an attempt to get things right, then I'll criticize them for what they got wrong. If they made no attempt to get things right, and yet they stumble on something that's right, I'll comment on what they got right.

Our planet has been around only for four and a half billion years. Let's imagine a planet that has life on it such as life is on Earth and it's seven billion years old. Let's say that planet evolved intelligence. Well, that intelligence would be way more advanced than what we call intelligence here on Earth. How long has intelligence been around on Earth as we've come to define it?

Everyone has all different experiences in school. I just know that throughout my life, at no time did any teacher ever point to me and say, hey. He'll go far.

If you look at the history of unexplained phenomena that was first explained by spiritual, mystical forces, the track record is not very good for the mystical, magical explanations to survive against more quote "mundane" physical explanations.

When you innovate, the jobs can't go overseas because other countries haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Let's invent a new tomorrow and then make it happen. Let's invent the city of tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, the transportation of tomorrow.

Pop culture is the scaffold we all carry around with us.

As important as the civil rights movement was, I think what will rise to the top is that we left Earth in that time.

I don't want to go back into space for military reasons, but the economic driver still remains. And so it's a matter of people understanding how that economic driver is revealed with healthy investments on the space frontier.

I can't think that leaving Earth once is enough.

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

You can deceive yourself into thinking that America is a technological leader, but if you don't see what anyone else is doing you have no accurate assessment - you can't make an accurate assessment of where you fit and why. I consider our moving frontier in space as the anecdote to that downward trend.

I don't have specific television ambitions in the sense that I remain fundamentally and academic, and so, my innermost ambitions are what's the next discovery I can make; that's in my direct center.

So many people have that kind of attitude and approach to learning that it gives me great hope for the world. I say hope in the sense that innovations in science and technology will be the engines of a 21st century economy and I don't want to go broke, as a nation. So, the hope I have is that, if people embrace it, we'll have a healthier, more secure, wealthier nation than we have.

There are books on my shelf that I'm not into. They are things I don't know anything about yet. It's going to lead me off into a new place. The books don't represent an interest; they represent a source of my ignorance.

Modern science is under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of your five senses.

My popularity does not derive from me pandering to people. People came to me. I don't tell anyone to follow me on Twitter. I don't tell people to like my Facebook page. I don't tell people to fill the venue. I'm offered to people, and then people come.

We have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not.

I knew my interest in the universe and I owned a telescope that I bought with money I earned by walking dogs. 50 cents per walk, per dog, and that accumulated quickly. I bought a camera, a telescope. I taught myself astrophotography. I did all this.

You should chose your heroes a-la carte. Picking and choosing from one and then another, thereby assembling a kind of composite hero. That way when you discover something reprehensible about any one of them it matters nothing to you because that's not the part of them that piqued your interest.

The Earth is just one place of many that we could hang our hats.

The universe for me was other planets and other star systems and other galaxies. I enjoyed tracking it, but it had no specific influence on my ambitions for that reason. It wasn't really far enough away from Earth to matter to me.

Today, in this, the 21st century, bedtime doesn't matter at all. All that matters is what you set for your DVR.

Plenty of people get excited about the universe.

I don't like trying to influence politicians, who are themselves representative of huge numbers of people. As an educator, I'd rather enlighten the people and educate the people and let they be the ones who put the pressure on their elected officials.

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.

I'm an educator, and I'm a scientist, and I speak what is objectively true. And if that offends you, I can try to have a conversation with you to ask why it offends you, and tell you why objective truth should not offend you because that's how the world works.

You innovate in ways that stoke your economy. Because innovations in science and technology are the engines of 21st century economies.

The people that first climbed Mt. Everest weren't scientists, right, they were adventurers. If you're an adventurer, you want to go yourself. It's different than a scientist, who is simply wanting to learn.

With ticket prices, do you ask yourself, why I'm paying $70 to see the arts? You say, "No, that's what the symphony is costing me."

If there's something that someone else can do, let them do it. If I couldn't do it uniquely, let someone else do it and I would get back to the lab.

I always wanted to be respected for my mind.

If there's some kind of rock star status, would I be irresponsible if I didn't somehow use it for a continued greater good? I'm always involved in some way with reaching the public.

If there's a Devil, that mean's there's a God.

The world, I think, has too many late-night talk shows.

Without new economies, our old economies get our jobs taken from them because everyone else has figured out how to do it.

As an educator, I think educators should meet the people wherever they are. Don't even ask them to come half-way. Find them where they are, and sit on a couch with them.

If NASA were advancing a space frontier there would be challenges you've never seen before. You have to be creative and you have to patent some new idea. You get to Mars...well, how do we get the water from the soil? I gotta invent a new device that will do that. And the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how can we use that? Can we breathe the oxygen from the carbon dioxide?

Dark matter and dark energy are two things we measure in the universe that are making things happen, and we have no idea what the cause is.

Speaking as just simply an American who cares about the economic health of our country, I see one of the surest ways to bring wealth and prosperity to the country is to innovate in science and technology.

The discovery of any kind of life [in Space] at all would be a tremendous watershed moment in biology, as well as all of science.

When you're advancing a frontier it stimulates creativity to find solutions.

If you look at Einstein's equations and put in low speeds and low gravity, they become Newton's equations.

Evil or not, the recording industry kept Auto-Tune on the down-low. Cher's producer forced Auto-Tune to jump suddenly from one pitch to the next.

I want to create the airplane that flies in the rarified atmosphere of Mars. This is what galvanizes a generation to want to become scientists and engineers in the first place, not we need a scientist to develop a plane that's 20 percent more fuel-efficient than the one your parents flew.

There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?

I bet most of the crowd does not know that there are six moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto.

I would say - and paint doesn't peel unless it's acrylic paint, so maybe it is acrylic paint that they're using, not oil paint. So let me say yes, it would be acrylic house paint, which, when it dries, peels very nicely. So let's go with that.

I think I'm misunderstood when I post these comments about films. So here is Kate Winslet sitting on - you know, laying on this plank. This ship is down. She let her boyfriend drown. They didn't even try a second time to get him to float on that with her. So I'm angry by that. I think...

In this 21st century, bedtime doesn't matter at all. All that matters is what you set for your DVR [Digital Video Recorder].

You know, there's black holes and what - could there be wormholes? Could - might there be a multi-verse? These are all fascinating frontiers. What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? And what was around before the universe? And do we have access to higher dimensions?

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

I'd go back and hang out with Isaac Newton. I'm torn between do I hang out with him or do I bring him into the present to hang out with me. See, that might be terrifying because his head will just explode once he sees everything that was derived from his discoveries, but I'd spend more time with someone who I think is one of the most brilliant minds our species has ever known.

I agree that we should go back to the moon and on to Mars. We should treat all objects in the solar system, including comets and asteroids, as exploration targets.

My interest in the space program has a certain purity to it because I recognize the romance of it but I was never seduced by it. That allowed me to view it through a more purely scientific lens. My interest in space while in school came about through my scientific activities.

In physics, opinions don't matter, only demonstrated experiments. The day the fellow succeeds, if ever, he won't need anybody else's opinion.