Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Curious fact that those who never fail are also those who never truly succeed.

We're a sleepy nation right now. I want us to be a nation of innovation.

There's no doubt about it: more varieties of carbon-based molecules exist than all other kinds of molecules combined.

Complaints about the demise of society and the "youth of today" also tend to be timeless. Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.: Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

You know it's true… Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don't know. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the matter, and it's the gravity we don't understand.

We are, each of us, a little Universe

To learn that it's easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.

Some 14 billion years ago, at the beginning of time, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe fit within a pinhead.

If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.

To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of shit.

Throughout history, different cultures have produced creation myths that explain our origins as the result of cosmic forces shaping our destiny. These histories have helped us to ward off feelings of insignificance.

What we know is that the matter we have come to love in the universe—the stuff of stars, planets, and life—is only a light frosting on the cosmic cake, modest buoys afloat in a vast cosmic ocean of something that looks like nothing.

Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

On Friday the 13th, April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, we named it Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death.

The easy part is the ray's 500-second speed-of-light jaunt from the Sun to Earth, through the void of interplanetary space. The hard part is the light's million-year adventure to get from the Sun's center to its surface.

To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that's hard to do, then maybe it's easier if you imagine stuffing about a billion elephants into a Chapstick casing.

Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say that the universe has empowered us, here in our small corner of the cosmos, to figure itself out. And we have only just begun.

When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.

Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for thinking that the Sun, which is a million times the size of Earth, orbits Earth.

No doubt about it, we're smarter than every other living creature that ever ran, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that?

cool stars are red. Tepid stars are white. Hot stars are blue. Very hot stars are still blue. How about the very, very hot places, like the 15-million-degree center of the Sun? Blue. To an astrophysicist, red-hot foods and red-hot lovers both leave room for improvement.

In the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

the stated authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.