Neil deGrasse Tyson

“In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the l...”

“One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because...”

“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 wou...”

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

“We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.”

“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...”

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

“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.”

“The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out...”

“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 monst...”

“But you can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the...”

“If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person’s body, and tied them end-to-end…the person will die.”

“Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the perso...”

“While the Copernican principle comes with no guarantees that it will forever guide us to cosmic truths, it's worked quite well so far: not only is Earth not in the center of the solar system...”

“How do we change the way science is taught? Ask anybody how many teachers truly made a difference in their life, and you never come up with more than the fingers on one hand. You remember th...”

“Last I had kept count, there were fifty-six moons among the planets in the Solar System. Then I woke up one morning to learn that another dozen had been discovered around Saturn. After that...”

“Had Herschel succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.”

“At New York City's Rose Center of Earth and Space, we display a timeline spiral of the Universe that begins at the Big Bang and unfolds 13.8 billion years. Uncurled, it's the length of a foo...”

“It's not as though we're down here on Earth and the rest of the universe is out there. To begin with, we're genetically connected to each other and to all other life-forms on Earth. We're mu...”

“This universality of physical laws tells us that if we land on another planet with a thriving alien civilization, they will be running on the same laws that we have discovered and tested her...”