Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.

I'm constantly claimed by atheists. I find this intriguing. In fact, on my Wiki page - I didn't create the Wiki page, others did, and I'm flattered that people cared enough about my life to assemble it - and it said, 'Neil deGrasse is an atheist.'

I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.

Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.

There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.

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. They just happen to be a very vocal fraction, so you got the impression that there are more of them than there actually is.

You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have scientific literacy in topics that matter for future political issues.

The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. That's just not true. In fact, we hold our highest rewards for those scientists who can prove others wrong. And by the way, they are famous in their own lifetimes. We don't wait until they're dead.

Every day, I wake up and I say, 'Why... how... did I end up with 1.7 million Twitter followers?' It's freaky to me, every day, but that tells me that there's an appetite out there that had previously been underserved. There's an inner geek in us all, an inner bit of curiosity that people are discovering, and they like it.

Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

You can't come away with this cosmic perspective thinking that you are better than others and want to fight. That's why you'll never have astrophysicists leading nations into war.

I don't comment on the physics errors of 'Star Wars,' all right. I just - you let that one go.

I never got into 'Star Wars.' Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

NASA has spin-offs, and it's a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery.

I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

I love the smell of the universe in the morning.

Some of us wake up in the morning and just wonder how it is any of us actually sustain a paid job.

Wanna lose 1200 Calories a month? Drink a liter of ice water a day. You burn the energy just raising the water to body temp.

If aliens did visit us, I'd be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy.

I see myself in pop culture. I listen to pop music, I do pop things, and I'm also a scientist.

We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled.

Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine