Neil deGrasse Tyson

"If every day were Earth Day we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"If every day were #EarthDay we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"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're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"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."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"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."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"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."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"We live in the kind of society where, in almost all cases, hard work is rewarded."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers — poets, actors, journalists — they [...] embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don’t fight science and they don’t fight technology."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"There is no greater education than one that is self-driven."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Kids are born scientists. They’re born probing the natural world that surrounds them. They’ll lift up a rock. They’ll pick up a bug. They’ll pull petals off of a flower. They’ll ask you why the grass is green and the sky is blue, and they’ll experiment with breakable things indoor house. I think the best thing a parent can do, when raising a child, is simply get out of their way."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Cosmology does, I think, affect the way that we perceive humanity’s role in nature. One thing we’ve learnt from astronomy is that the future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past. Even our sun is less than halfway through its life."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"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."

- 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."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"I’ve got to give props to the Jesuit priests."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. 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.'"

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"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 to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?"

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson