1,151 Quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist’s domain-is infinitely more daunting.

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.

The universe’s destiny has very little to do with the near-term destiny of Earth.

I don’t know how Albert would have felt about this, but an unknown element was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb test in the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952, and was named einsteinium in his honour. I might have named it armageddium instead.

I think on some level, role models are overrated If you require a role model who looks just like you to be something you wanna be and you can’t find one, is that a reason to not be what you wanna be? No!

People who navigate by the stars know that the altitude of Polaris you observe is equal to your latitude on Earth.

Our star, and most stars, are made mostly of hydrogen, which is the number one element in the universe: 90% of all atomic nuclei are hydrogen, about 8% are helium, and the remaining 2% comprise all the other elements in the periodic table. All.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.