Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

I want to know what dark matter and dark energy are comprised of. They remain a mystery, a complete mystery. No one is any closer to solving the problem than when these two things were discovered.

Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.

The first trillionaire in the world will be the person who mines asteroids.

No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles.

It turns out our brain is sensitive, maybe too sensitive, to motion. It's a survival mechanism.

In the first year of a child's life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their lives we want them to sit down and be quiet.

Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.

The universe is so amazing and so limitless, who wouldn't want to study the universe?

I don't even understand why I have 1.7 million Twitter followers. Every day, I want to remind them and say, "Do you realize I'm an astrophysicist? Do you know what you're doing here?"

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.

If you only think of me during Black History Month, I must be failing as an educator and as an astrophysicist.

For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.

The problem is not scientifically illiterate kids; it is scientifically illiterate adults. Kids are born curious about the natural world. They are always turning over rocks, jumping with two feet into mud puddles and playing with the tablecloth and fine china.

In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.

As history has shown, pure science research ultimately ends up applying to something. We just don't know it at the time.

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination

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.

Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space.

People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.

WhenIWasYourAge: People were never "living with their disease." We cured them. Or they died from it.

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

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

We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.