Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

however big our world is - in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps - the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Explore the universe for what it is, rather than for what it seems.

As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it's not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people - theologians as well scientists - have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case.

The problem comes when religion enters the science classroom. There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling preachers what to teach. Scientists don't picket churches. By and large—though it may not look this way today—science and religion have achieved peaceful coexistence for quite some time. In fact, the greatest conflicts in the world are not between religion and science; they're between religion and religion.

Science depends on organized skepticism, that is, on continual, methodical doubting. Few of us doubt our own conclusions, so science embraces its skeptical approach by rewarding those who doubt someone else's.

After 50 years of television, there's no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.   IN

I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. (Brewster 1860, p. 331)

The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

To govern a society shared by people of emotion, people of reason, and everybody in between—as well as people who think their actions are shaped by logic but in fact are shaped by feelings or nonempirical philosophies—you need politics.

Turns out, while all light pollution is bad for astrophysics, the low-pressure sodium lamps are least bad because their contamination can be easily subtracted from telescope data. In a model of cooperation, the entire city of Tucson, Arizona, the nearest large municipality to the Kitt Peak National Observatory, has, by agreement with the local astrophysicists, converted all its streetlights to low-pressure sodium lamps.

The leptons most familiar to the non-physicist are the electron and perhaps the neutrino; and the most familiar quarks are . . . well, there are no familiar quarks.

you cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position. Although, in principle, you could perform this stunt if you managed to let loose a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulence.

Quarks are quirky beasts. Unlike protons, each with an electric charge of +1, and electrons, with a charge of –1, quarks have fractional charges that come in thirds.

The one we call Earth formed in a kind of Goldilocks zone around the Sun, where oceans remain largely in liquid form.

WHAT IS NOW PROVED WAS ONCE ONLY IMAGIND —WILLIAM BLAKE

Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

How do you study something that cannot possibly get your clothes dirty? How do astrophysicists know anything about either the universe or its contents if all the objects to be studied are light-years away? Fortunately, the light emanating from a star reveals much more to us than its position in the sky or how bright it is.

If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can visit the sky together.

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.

You can not become a scientist if you require that every question has an answer because its the very questions that have no answer that attract you to a laboratory every single day.

Our planet Earth has a diameter of 0.04 light-seconds. Neptune's orbit spans 8 light-hours. The stars of the Milky Way galaxy delineate a broad, flat disk about 100,000 light-years across. And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, to which the Milky Way belongs, extends some 60 million light-years.

where data are sparse, competing ideas abound that are clever and wishful.

One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject, to know you're wrong.

The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.