Best 738 quotes of Neil Degrasse Tyson on MyQuotes

Neil Degrasse Tyson

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    A conspiracy theorist is a person who tacitly admits that they have insufficient data to prove their points. A conspiracy is a battle cry of a person with insufficient data.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    After your first job, is anyone asking you what your GPA was? No, they don't care. They ask you: Are you a good leader? Do people follow you? Do you have integrity? Are you innovative? Do you solve problems? Somebody's got to do that homework and redesign the educational system so that it can actually train people to be successful in life.

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    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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    All of the full moons for the entire year are special in that they have particular names.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    All the great advances in cinema came about from technology. The 3-D camera was not invented by a movie director. The new industries are driven by the innovations in science and technology.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.

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    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    And I don't care what else anyone has ever told you, the Sun is white, not yellow. Human color perception is a complicated business, but if the Sun were yellow, like a yellow lightbulb, then white stuff such as snow would reflect this light and appear yellow-a snow condition confirmed to happen only near fire hydrants.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Anyone who has wrestled knows that it's the hardest thing in the world to do. Anyone who says something else is the hardest thing has never wrestled. That's what I have found. ... You don't wrestle because it's easy, you wrestle because it's hard. I don't do astrophysics because it's easy, I do it because it's hard. And I juxtapose the two in my mind, body, and soul all the time.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Apart from the obvious advantages of having ice to melt, filter, then drink, you can also break apart the water's hydrogen from its oxygen. Use the hydrogen and some of the oxygen as active ingredients in rocket fuel and keep the rest of the oxygen for breathing. And in your spare time between space missions, you can always go ice skating on the frozen lake created with the extracted water.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it’s not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people—theologians as well scientists - have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

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

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    As the plow pushes through a parking lot of light fluffy snow, the snow clumps together in bigger and bigger chunks. Out in space, pressure hitting a gas cloud has a similar effect, except, instead of snowballs, you get stars!

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    As 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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Astronauts are the only kind of celebrity I know who can have a line of people waiting for their autograph, even if the line of people does not know in advance the astronaut's name.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Astronomers do not commonly use Venereal, in favor of the less contagious-sounding Venutian. Blame the medical community, who snatched the word long before astronomers had any good use for it. I suppose you can't blame the doctors. Venus is the goddess of beauty and love, so she ought to be the goddess of its medical consequences.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Astrophysicists perfected navigation. We perfected all these things that matter to the power of nations manifest on the world stage. So we want to go into space. That's the new high ground, right? We care about multispectral imaging of things. Well, that's what reconnaissance wants to do. So our expertise has been in bed with national security needs forever. So maybe, secretly, that's why they keep us employed.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    A supernova is one of the most powerful explosions in the universe. It's so luminous, it can be seen across billions of light years. It releases as much energy in an instant as our sun will produce over its 10-billion-year lifetime.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    A television advertisement must illustrate the scientific method to substantiate any claim.... That is why stains are lifted, ring-around-the-collar is removed, paper towels become soaked, excess stomach acid is absorbed, and headaches go away-all during the commercial.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    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.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    Before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    'Boldly going where hundreds have gone before' does not make headlines.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    But one of the coolest things about meteorites is that most were formed four-and-a-half-billion years ago, during the birth of our solar system, when, for reasons not yet known, a cloud of gas and dust was transformed into a sun with circling planets.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    But the moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    But to carve the Grand Canyon, Earth required millions of years. To excavate Meteor Crater, the universe, using a sixty-thousand-ton asteroid traveling upward of twenty miles per second, required a fraction of a second. No offense to Grand Canyon lovers, but for my money, Meteor Crater is the most amazing natural landmark in the world.

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    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?

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    Neil Degrasse Tyson

    But you will hardly ever read about them. Why? Because once again, the media has predetermined what is not worthy of coverage, even when the news item is something as uninteresting as the cosmic origin of every element in your body.