Quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, were still at the mercy of nature.

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you dont expect.

Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They dont fight science and they dont fight technology.

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. Its 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.

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrows problems flow.

Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug.

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

We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And its the brain wiring that Im more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan thats been proposed.

If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, were tackling these mysteries one by one. If youre going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. Thats not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

In science, if you dont do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didnt compose the Ninth Symphony, no one else before or after is going to compose the Ninth Symphony that he composed; no one else is going to paint Starry Night by van Gogh.

Im often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period.

One of the greatest features of science is that it doesnt matter where you were born, and it doesnt matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, youll get the same result.

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate, its not simply, Do you know what DNA is? Or what the Big Bang is? Thats an aspect of science literacy. The biggest part of it is do you know how to think about information thats presented in front of you.

You cant train kids in a world where adults have no concept of what science literacy is. The adults are gonna squash the creativity that would manifest itself, because theyre clueless about what it and why it matters. But science can always benefit from the more brains there are that are thinking about it - but thats true for any field.

While Im a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, its the real universe that calls to me.

Lets say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps cant do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.

Im on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they believe, the science is more extraordinary than anything they can invent.