1,151 Quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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?

These largely empty volumes of space – the far-rural regions of each galaxy – contain too little visible matter to explain the anomalously high orbital speeds of the tracers.

We embark on this quest not from a simple desire, but from a mandate of our species to search for our place in the cosmos. The quest is old, not new. And has garnered the attention of thinkers great and small, across time and across culture. What we have discovered, the poets have known all along.

The universe is knowable...

If a particle can fall into a black hole, it can come out of a white hole.

Spheres are indeed fertile theoretical tools that help us gain insight into all manner of astrophysical problems. But one should not be a sphere-zealot. I am reminded of the half-serious joke about how to increase milk production on a farm: An expert in animal husbandry might say, “Consider the role of the cow’s diet... ” An engineer might say, “Consider the design of the milking machines... ” But it’s the astrophysicist who says, “Consider a spherical cow...

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we’re distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.

The most accurate measurements to date reveal dark energy as the most prominent thing in town, currently responsible for 68 percent of all the mass-energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27 percent, with regular matter comprising a mere 5 percent.

If all the molecules on Earth were stacked on each other end-to-end, everything on Earth would die.