Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.

If you don't question you're stuck within a pre-existing parameters of knowledge. Questions are what take you outside of those parameters.

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.

No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

We didn't build the interstate system to connect New York to Los Angeles because the West Coast was a priority. No, we webbed the highways so people can go to multiple places and invent ways of doing things not thought of by the persons building the roads.

The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.

All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet. Once you investigate that, you find out that Disney's dog Pluto was sketched the same year the cosmic object was discovered. And Pluto was discovered by an American.

All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet.

If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist.

To learn more about science, turn off your electronic device and go outside and look around a bit. Nature is calling you. Go on. The internet will still be here.

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

The day we stop exploring is the day we commit ourselves to live in a stagnant world, devoid of curiosity, empty of dreams.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security.

No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science.

On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)

There's no shortage of people that we can put on, because science touches us all.

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.

The telescope... is a conduit to the cosmos.

I can't tell you how many people say they were turned off from science because of a science teacher that completely sucked out all the inspiration and enthusiasm they had for the course.

They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong.