Top 500 Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The greatest teachers are the ones that turn a B student into an A student, or a failing student into a B student.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

252. “We are, each of us, a little Universe.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

253. “The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It’s a slightly bigger moon; I ain’t using the adjective ‘supermoon.’”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

254. “The most successful scientists in the history of the world are those who posed the right questions.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

255. “For ordinary household gravity, Newton’s law works just fine. It got us to the Moon and returned us safely to Earth in 1969. For black holes and the large-scale structure of the universe, we need general relativity.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

256. “Modern science is under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of your five senses.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

257. “Never presume that just because you disagree with an idea that you must be correct.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

258. “Odd how often blood is shed to obtain freedom from those in power. Oppressors must be the most insecure people in the world.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

259. “No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc. How about air? Also vital. A single breathful draws in more air molecules than there are breathfuls of air in Earth’s entire atmosphere. That means some of the air you just breathed passed through the lungs of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and Billy the Kid.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

260. “I’d bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

261. “Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people’s knowledge.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

262. “Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

263. “Until Sir Isaac Newton wrote down the universal law of gravitation, nobody had any reason to presume that the laws of physics at home were the same as everywhere else in the universe. Earth had earthly things going on and the heavens had heavenly things going on.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

264. “There’s a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

265. “Only when creative people take ownership of cosmic discovery will society accept science as the cultural activity that it is.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

266. “We didn’t go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we’re Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

267. “If Neptune were analogized with a Chevy Impala in mass, then how big is pluto compared to that? Pluto would be a matchbox car sitting on the curb.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

268. “Something we all have as kids and is beaten out of us as adults. Parents come up to me, “How do I get my kids interested in science?” They’re already interested in science. Just stop beating it out of them.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

269. “The universe is so amazing and so limitless, who wouldn’t want to study the universe?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

270. “If a scientist is not befuddled by what they’re looking at, then they’re not a research scientist.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

271. “Asteroids are craggy chunks of rock. Comets are balls of dirt, ice, and frozen gases. And meteors are, quite simply, whatever falls through and burns up in Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. Asteroids.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

272. “We’re an elective democracy where science and technology will define where the economically strong countries in the world will be. And science and technological literacy is important for security, as well.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

273. “The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

275. “To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that’s hard to do, then maybe it’s easier if you imagine stuffing about a billion elephants into a Chapstick casing.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

276. “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?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

277. “At the altitude of about 23,000 miles the satellite takes 23 hours and 56 minutes to orbit Earth. Earth takes 23 hours and 56 minutes to rotate.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

278. “Cosmologists have plenty of ego. How could you not when your job is to deduce what brought the universe into existence?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

279. “Seems the World goes batshit crazy, every few decades. Just long enough to forget the last time the World went batshit crazy.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

280. “It’s part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

281. “One substantial hunk of junk led to the formation of the Moon. The unexpected scarcity of iron and other higher-mass elements in the Moon, derived from lunar samples returned by Apollo astronauts, indicates that the Moon most likely burst forth from Earth’s iron-poor crust and mantle after a glancing collision with a wayward Mars-sized protoplanet.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

282. “If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you’ve got to send humans.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

283. “Had Earth been much closer to the Sun, the oceans would have evaporated. Had Earth been much farther away, the oceans would have frozen. In either case, life as we know it would not have evolved.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

284. “One should not be too distracted by definitions. Ideas transcend definitions.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

285. “First, get your facts straight. Then, distort them at your leisure.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

286. “Differences in opinion enrich the diversity of a nation, and ought to be cherished and respected in any free society, provided everyone remains free to disagree with one another and, most importantly, everyone remains open to rational arguments that could change your mind.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

287. “There’s nothing like the right telescope in the right hands of the right person at the right time for the right price.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

288. “Astrophysics teaches us that we’re not the center of the world.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

289. “Geek e-mail sign-off: No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

290. “We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

291. “Why can’t Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn’t exist then they don’t have a favorite planet. Right? Please write back but not in cursive because I can’t read cursive.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

292. “So when I think of, what is the meaning of life, to me, that’s not an eternal unanswerable question. To me it is in arms reach of me every day.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

293. “I’m a fan of the planets in any combination. When I was born, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Sun, and the Moon were all in the sky.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

294. “I want and need the artist to take me to new places, and the new place that Van Gogh took me not the sky as it is but the sky as he felt it. And the more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

295. “Look unto the stars to teach us How the master’s thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton’s math Silently along its path.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

296. “I remain unconvinced that anything other than rapid decomposition is the fate of my body and mind after death.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

297. “Space in general gave us GPS – that’s not specifically NASA, but it’s investments in space.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

298. “I never volunteer to talk about god or religion, but people feel compelled to talk about it.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

299. “The world has persisted many a long year, having once been set going in the appropriate motions. From these everything else follows.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

300. “Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren’t always faithful to the core values of science.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson