1,151 Quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The last person I ever want working for me is someone who says ’that’s not in my job description.

If it’s a new planet, sign me up. I’m tired of driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in orbit around earth-give me a place to go and I’ll go.

Let’s get China to leak a memo that says they want to build military bases on Mars. We’d be on Mars in twelve months.

In America, there are people who don’t read science fiction but still think about tomorrow, so it’s not only the force of science-fiction that makes you a tomorrow thinker.

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.

The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, ‘Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.’ Which is a non-thought.

The good thing about the laws of physics is that they require no law enforcement agencies to maintain them.

I don’t have specific television ambitions in the sense that I remain fundamentally and academic, and so, my innermost ambitions are what’s the next discovery I can make; that’s in my direct center.

Grab something off the shelf that’s on the spaceship-an ashtray, it doesn’t matter what. Because I can tell you, if they flew here from another galaxy, no matter what you’ve pulled off the shelf, it’ll be unlike anything we have on Earth.