Quotes from Neil deGrasse Tyson

The greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.

Only when you question does society move or advance at all.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

Part of me thinks that I've been called by the universe, to get all sort of spiritual about it. Like, I've had no actual say in the matter. The universe found me.

In life and in the universe it's always best to keep looking up.

I'm not as famous as Stephen Hawking, but certainly in the U.S., I have a very high profile for a scientist. It is an awesome responsibility, one that I don't shoulder lightly.

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions.

You have people who believe they are scientifically literate but, in fact, are not. And I don't mind if you're not scientifically literate, but just admit that to yourself, so that you'll know, and perhaps you can take a first step to try to eradicate that.

There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.

I've spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I'm an academic. Being an academic means I don't wield power over person, place or thing. I don't command armies; I don't lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought.

Adults, who outnumber kids four or five to one, are in charge. We wield the resources, run the world, and completely thwart kids' creativity.

There is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying, 'I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet, because this gave me insight. Let's go test that prediction,' and have the prediction be correct.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

People think about life from day-to-day rather than thinking about life as something that invents a new kind of tomorrow.

Perhaps we've never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon earth and decided there's no sign of intelligent life.

I don't see why there is no intelligent alien life in the universe.

The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking.

I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that's hard to do for a city kid because when you look up you just see buildings - and really, your first thought is to look in people's windows. So to look out of the space - out of living space - and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively.

Big ideas, big ambitious projects need to be embedded within culture at a level deeper than the political winds. It needs to be deeper than the economic fluctuations that could turn people against an expensive project because they're on an unemployment line and can't feed their families.

There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.

The greatest teachers are the ones that turn a B student into an A student, or a failing student into a B student.

There's nothing a teacher likes better than ten minute videos. It's not the whole class, but it's not too short, it's enough to wrap a lesson plan around.