Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.”

“You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach...”

“Most religious people in America fully embrace science. So the argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small fraction of those who declare that they are religious. Th...”

“The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in scie...”

“If we find life out there, and it's not us, we will deem it not intelligent. But what may be equally as likely is that we find life that's vastly more intelligent than we are. If that's the...”

“We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'”

“Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.”

“If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.”

“Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is b...”

“If your ego starts out, 'I am important, I am big, I am special,' you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No,...”

“You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't mean just whether a politician is scientific...”

“Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, s...”

“The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.”

“For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations.”

“I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and p...”

“The only driver stronger than an economic argument to do something is the war argument, the I-don't-want-to-die argument.”

“With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, 'Oh, let's build a robot' and what's the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That's so 1950...”

“We live on this speck called Earth - think about what you might do, today or tomorrow - and make the most of it.”

“There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us...”

“The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.”