Top 896 Quotes & Sayings by Neil deGrasse Tyson - Page 5

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.

Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh.

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they've got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. Because that's when we're going to fight.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

If factual information upsets you, then you are creating a world that is not embracing objective truths, and that's not how you advance a democracy.

On Friday the 13th, April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, we named it Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death.

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people's politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

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

You don't want to raise a kid in a culture where the kid who asks the most questions is annoying. You want a culture where the kid who asks the most questions gets awards and gets another piece of cake.

I wonder if, in fact, we have been observed by aliens and upon close examination of human conduct and human behavior they have concluded that there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

If we have the power to turn another planet into Earth, then we have the power to turn Earth back into Earth.

Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.

We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

America 2012: The Learning Channel has HoneyBooBoo, History Channel has PawnStars: and the Science Channel has PumpkinChunkin

The molecules that comprise our body are traceable to the crucibles of the centers of stars.These atoms and molecules are in us because, in fact, the universe is in us. And, we are not only figuratively, but literally, stardust.

In whatever you choose to do, do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Math and physics and astrophysics are hard. For every hard thing you accomplish, fewer other people are out there doing the same thing as you. That's what doing something hard means. And in the limit of this, everyone beats a path to your door because you're the only one around who understands the impossible concept or who solves the unsolvable problem.

How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!"

If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.

If you're really successful at bullshitting, it means you're not hanging around enough people smarter than you.

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled.

God is an ever receding pocket of? scientific ignorance.

To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of bullshit.

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

Does it mean, if you don't understand something, and the community of physicists don't understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here's a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand [and now we do understand] [...]. If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that's how you want to come at the problem

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.

To learn more about science, turn off your electronic device and go outside and look around a bit. Nature is calling you. Go on. The internet will still be here.

For centuries, epilepsy was the exact expectation of someone being possessed by the Devil. There was no better explanation, and it allows you to admit the existence of the Devil. If there's a Devil, that mean's there's a God.

It's better to understand something than to memorize something.

Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg, laid by a bird that was not a chicken.

Whether or not you can never become great at something, you can always become better at it. Don't ever forget that! And don’t say “I’ll never be good”. You can become better! and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.

Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.

We are only intelligent by our own measures

To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.

Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

When we try to look farther into the universe we come to what appears to be the end of space but actually it's the beginning of time.

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

Facts are true whether or not you believe them.

Why can't we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.

After 50 years of television, there's no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.

God displayed a sense of humor when he configured the region between our legs an entertainment complex built around a sewage system.

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'

Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food. There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows.

When students cheat on exams, it's because our school system values grades more than students value learning.

My goal is not to shove information into your head. It's to find ways to reignite the curiosity that we all had as children for the natural world. You don't have to tell a child to explore the backyard.

George Bush, within a week of this [the 9/11 attacks], in a speech, attempting to distinguish US from the Muslim fundamentalists, said Our God is the God who named the stars. The problem is: two-thirds of all stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making.

There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There's no wild cows... You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection.

Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.

Knowledge of the natural world and how it works should be counted as fundamental to informed governance. You can't have a functioning democracy, if the electorate is under-informed or, worse, mis-informed.

WhenIWasYourAge: We had to open all doors by ourselves. None of them knew we were coming.

WhenIWasYourAge: It took a week to learn whether your photos came out okay.

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

As areas of knowledge grow, so too do the perimeters of ignorance.

A common way to compute density is, of course, to take the ratio of an object's mass to its volume. But other types of densities exist, such as the resistance of somebody's brain to the imparting of common sense.