Top 500 Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

202. “UV is bad for molecules because its high energy breaks the bonds between a molecule’s constituent atoms. That’s why UV is bad for you, too: it’s always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

203. “I’m not criticizing the science in Star Wars. That’s a waste of everybody’s time.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

204. “Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

205. “In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

206. “To believe in a universe as young as 6- or 7,000 years old, is to extinguish the light of most of the galaxy.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

207. “We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out – and we have only just begun.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

208. “Gamma rays are the sort of radiation you should avoid. Want proof? Just remember how the comic strip character “The Hulk” became big, green, and ugly.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

209. “God displayed a sense of humor when he configured the region between our legs an entertainment complex built around a sewage system.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

210. “Bosons, by the way, are named for the Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

211. “I love the future we might invent for ourselves that I have not yet dreamt of.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

212. “I don’t have an issue with what you do in the church, but I’m gonna be up in your face if you’re gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me they’ve got to teach what you’re teaching in your Sunday school. Because that’s when we’re gonna fight!”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

213. “Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun’s green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

214. “The Speed of Light: It’s Not Just a Good Idea It’s the Law. Unlike.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

215. “My favorite parody of this gesture was a skit on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, shortly after the Voyager launch, in which they showed a written reply from the aliens who recovered the spacecraft. The note simply requested, “Send more Chuck Berry.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

216. “In some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the eternal transition from the past to the future.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

217. “We live in the kind of society where, in almost all cases, hard work is rewarded.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

218. “It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle’s falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

219. “The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual – even redemptive – but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

220. “The tenacity of life is mind-boggling. We keep finding it where no one thought it could be.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

221. “The universe is knowable and what one need not apeal to mystical, magical forces to account for things.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

222. “If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

223. “If each dead person became a ghost, there’d be more than 100 billion of them haunting us all. Creepy, but cool.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

224. “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!”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

225. “I didn’t even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don’t know that they’re there, you don’t know that you’re missing them.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

226. “Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

227. “If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

228. “I object to religion in science classrooms not because it’s religion but because it’s not science.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

229. “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.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

230. “The first trillionaire will be the person who exploits space resources on asteroids, on comets...”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

231. “As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I’m a scientist. But I can tell you, I’m not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

232. “If you seek only easy problems to solve, then ultimately, there’ll be nothing about you to distinguish yourself from others.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

233. “The chances that your tombstone will read ‘Killed by Asteroid’ are about the same as they’d be for ‘Killed in Airplane Crash.’”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

234. “As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

235. “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.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

236. “If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

237. “Next time you’re stunned by a large moon on the horizon, bend over and view it between your legs. The effect goes away entirely.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

238. “Miniaturization of electronics started by NASA’s push became an entire consumer products industry. Now we’re carrying the complete works of Beethoven on a lapel pin listening to it in headphones.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

239. “I knew my interest in the universe and I owned a telescope that I bought with money I earned by walking dogs. 50 cents per walk, per dog, and that accumulated quickly. I bought a camera, a telescope. I taught myself astrophotography. I did all this.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

240. “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.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

242. “Emotional truths woven by lawyers in the court of law are apparently more important than the truths of actual events. I have grown to fear for those whose innocence became trapped within the legal system.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

243. “Everyone has all different experiences in school. I just know that throughout my life, at no time did any teacher ever point to me and say, hey. He’ll go far.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

244. “I can’t think that leaving Earth once is enough.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

245. “Earth has also tidally locked the Moon, leaving it with identical periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around Earth. Wherever and whenever this happens, the locked moon shows only one face to its host planet.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

246. “I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our existence.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

247. “If Pizza sizes were given in area not diameter, you’d see instantly that a 7 inch is less than half the size of a 10 inch pie.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

248. “People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

249. “You don’t want to raise a kid in a culture where the kid who asks the most questions is annoying. You want a culture where the kid who asks the most questions gets awards and gets another piece of cake.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

250. “For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson