Top 896 Quotes & Sayings by Neil deGrasse Tyson - Page 14

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. And there's Columbus - he couldn't even get Italy to pay for his voyage so he has to go to Spain.

Wanting to do one thing can require that you take on other interests.

I believe that the manned space program can engage the public by advancing the space frontier. Every next mission takes you farther out in space than you were before, either technologically or in terms of distance.

Because we all just function, the rest of us, just go to work and come home; artists make life bearable. They give perspectives on things we never knew you could have. They bring joy. They explore inner human emotion, and at its best, the full dynamic range of that emotion.

Science, and its impact on a person's livelihood is the common denominator.

A successful day for me is when I teach people something. They become enlightened by an idea and learn how to think about it, so that later on when someone says, "Tell me about x, y, z," they don't have to say, "I know this because Tyson told me." No, they'll say, "Here's why it's true because I know and understand it."

Wow, monitor lizards are pretty gnarly creatures. I want to go with the monitor lizard. That's just weird enough to be true. No?

The value of the space program is beyond science, it's beyond military; it's a cultural shift in how we think of our place in the universe.

For me, one of the most fertile consequences of the space program is the extent to which it stimulates people to innovate because they want to create a different tomorrow than what they're living in today. And it's that culture of innovation that spawns entirely new economies.

When I would lose matches, I fully respected the person who beat me, because they beat me. I can't blame anybody.

The educated elite is not without their own actual snobbery. And I kind of an anti-elitist in that regard.

Just before I said I wanted to be an astronomer I said I wanted to be a baseball player. I was quite athletic at the time, probably because I was bigger than other kids, and if you're bigger than other kids and you're 11 you win everything.

I try to educate the public and let them make the decisions for themselves.

I don't know why a beauty salon would have a cop's hat and the curling irons are not deadly unless they're still plugged in and they're hot. So I'm not quite sure about that. But I don't know who remembers anymore that you can ignite spray cans, plus there aren't really any spray cans anymore 'cause that was destroying the ozone layer. So I'm - actually, I'll have to go with they chased him with the curling irons.

The StarTalks - while kids can watch them, they're actually targeted at adults. Because adults outnumber kids five to one, and adults vote, and adults wield resources, and adults are heads of agencies. So if we're going to affect policy, or affect attitudes, for me, the adults have always been the target population.

I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

Enjoying science shouldn't be rocket science.

If we want to unlock the secret behind the origin of our sun and its planets, it would be helpful to find some remnants from the birth itself, an event that took place about four-and-a-half-billion years ago.

That the north star is the brightest in the night sky. I'd guess about 9 out of 10 people think this. But it does not require a grant from the National Science Foundation to learn the answer. The North Star is not even in the top 40 in the night sky. It's the 49th brightest star. Rather dull and boring by most measures.

The only accounting we had of the origins and the structure of nature was Biblical Genesis.

I as an astrophysicist, see the universe, feel the universe, smell the universe every day. Every day. And for people to say, I'm cool, I'm right here, it's all I need.

The history of science shows that great mysteries get solved. It may be that there's an answer that humans are too stupid to understand. I'm intrigued by that possibility.

I've never been the critic of reality TV that others have, especially many of my colleagues who wonder if it's just the end of America. It's a free market and you just put it on. The fact that science has not been on neck-and-neck with it means that people believe science could not compete on that level.

I try to write in a way where you care deeply what the next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me, distinguishes great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don't even claim that I'm good. I claim that I value it.

We're an elective democracy where science and technology will define where the economically strong countries in the world will be. And science and technological literacy is important for security, as well.

85 percent of the gravity of the universe has a point of origin about which we know nothing.

America has an economy reversing relative to other nations in the world. And I want to turn that around. And one way I know to turn it around is to get everyone excited about what it is to innovate again.

'Cause a musician, you can't tell me, "I've got this message I want share with the public," and it's three-and-a-half minutes long. That's not it. If your message is only three-and-a-half minutes long, then we got nothing else to talk about. Because life is more complex than three-and-a-half minutes.

No one with a living room radio that was a piece of furniture at the time would say, gee. I want to carry that around on my hip pocket. That was not a thought until NASA initiated this whole exercise. So there's an influence that's not just spinoff.

This past year, we received our second Emmy nomination for Outstanding Informational Series. While we'd all like to win, I can say with utmost sincerity that it mattered more to me that we got noticed than whether or not we win.

When you advance a frontier and you do tomorrow what's never been done today, you have to innovate to make that happen. You become an innovation culture. When I grew up, every time I turned around it was, "Oh, here's the longest bridge or the deepest tunnel or the fastest airplane." And I originally thought that was just kind of like a pissing contest with men with too much testosterone. And then I realized that to make the tallest building you have to innovate. To make the fastest train you have to design the train in a way that it's never been designed before.

Let's create a World's Fair that captures everybody's visions of tomorrow together and let's celebrate that vision. Let's have articles on it with illustrators imagining how we'd be living differently.

I don't require that the main guest [of StarTalk] have any science knowledge or background at all. It's just, I have a conversation with them, it's long and winding, and we find out what parts of what we learn about the person lend themselves to further scientific discussion with an expert who is brought into the studio. So that's how that comes together.

Miniaturization of electronics started by NASA's push became an entire consumer products industry. Now we're carrying the complete works of Beethoven on a lapel pin listening to it in headphones.

It would be great if we were on multiple planets, but I think that's unrealistic. Hawking says we have to be on multiple planets so an asteroid could come and you'd still have some humans left. It's a nice idea. It satisfies the multiple-eggs-in-multiple-baskets concept.

I think the material that inspires artists is the fabric of the soul of civilization.

To get an Emmy nomination for a show that was the first-ever science talk show on television to us was an affirmation that there is an appetite for this content in the mainstream public, not just the erudite public. So we're all completely thrilled by it.

I'm a little fatigued of adults saying we've got to worry about the kids. And these are the same adults that don't know science and are running things and wielding resources and legislation.

In America, there are people who don't read science fiction but still think about tomorrow, so it's not only the force of science-fiction that makes you a tomorrow thinker.

We account for all the matter and energy that we're familiar with, measure up how much gravity it should have, it's one-sixth of the gravity that's actually operating on the universe. We call that dark matter. It really should be called dark gravity. We don't know what that is.

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate is how you think about information that's presented in front of you. I think that's the great challenge. You have people who believe they do know how to think about the information, but don't, and they're in the position of power and legislation. You can't base a society on non-objectively verifiable truth. Otherwise, it's a fantasy land and science is the pathway to those emerging truths that are hard-earned and that some have taken decades, if not centuries, to emerge from experiments all around the world.

In astrophysics, we care about how matter, motion and energy manifest in objects and phenomenon in the universe. Stars are born. They live out their lives. They die. Some of the ones that die explode. Our sun will not be one of those, but it will die. And it'll take Earth with us. So we make sure we have other destinations in mind when that happens. And I've got it on my calendar.

Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing.

Here's something that intrigues me: If you have faith, you believe regardless of the evidence, yet if there's ever evidence to support faith, everyone goes to it and points to it.

As children we all wonder - we wonder all the time. And that gets lost in adulthood. It gets beaten out, it gets filtered out or diluted out.

When I was a kid, I thought that if everyone looked up the way I did then everyone would want to study the universe just like me - how could they not? This naiveté is what tells me that my interest was more a calling than a rational comparative assessment about what to be when I grew up.

Science is not just 'Here are some facts, learn that'. There's a thread through these stories that, if you know how to tell it because you know how they connect, then it's a thread that will land right in your mind, body and soul.

I don't want to make a member of Congress do something that that member of Congress's constituents would not approve of, or would not agree to. So in that regard, I'm kind of the opposite of a lobbyist.

Space is the ultimate frontier. I think when people historically thought of the frontier, there was where you were living and then there was some edge beyond which no one had explored.

A state of negative energy means that you are essentially getting something for nothing.

If God to you is where science has yet to tread, then God is an ever-receding pocket.

Part of me thinks that I've been called by the universe, to get all sort of spiritual about it. Like, I've had no actual say in the matter. The universe found me.

Science is a fundamental part of our existence.

The greatest teachers are the ones that turn a B student into an A student, or a failing student into a B student.

Science is not just a topic we can step around or ignore.

Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

If you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career. Or at least you will love it more, and you won't lead a depressed day of your life.

Einstein's theory, we know that it fails. In advance, we know it fails. So that a deeper understanding of nature is awaiting us.

If we're going to affect policy, or affect attitudes, for me, the adults have always been the target population.

Life existed on Earth for nearly four billion years before anything remotely resembling a human being showed up. And even then, when we started to branch off from other apes about 10,000,000 years ago, our ancestors looked pretty different.