Top 500 Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

276. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes, Country Quotes

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

281. “To learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

282. “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

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. “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

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

286. “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

287. “We’ve come a long way since Herschel’s experiments with rays that were “unfit for vision,” empowering us to explore the universe for what it is, rather than for what it seems to be. Herschel would be proud. We achieved true cosmic vision only after seeing the unseeable: a dazzlingly rich collection of objects and phenomena across space and across time that we may now dream of in our philosophy.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

290. “Science literacy is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

291. “Without a doubt, the most spectacular way to die in space is to fall into a black hole.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

293. “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

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

295. “The cosmic perspective shows us that the very atoms and particles that make up our bodies are spread across the universe itself, making us one and the same.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

296. “But really we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

297. “School is not only a place to learn, but a place to learn how to learn.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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