Neil DeGrasse Tyson Quotes

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

My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.

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

God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination

I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime

I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct - if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal.

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

... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.

It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's already 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.

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.

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults.

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

When asked about which scientist he'd like to meet, Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "Isaac Newton. No question about it. The smartest person ever to walk the face of this earth. The man was connected to the universe in spooky ways. He discovered the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, the laws of optics. Then he turned 26.

I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.

Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?