Top 500 Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

302. “I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don’t know.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

303. “The one we call Earth formed in a kind of Goldilocks zone around the Sun, where oceans remain largely in liquid form.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

304. “No day before October 10, 1582, actually occurred on the Gregorian calendar for that was when the calendar was implemented officially.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

305. “A bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same height. Do the Physics.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

306. “Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

307. “Turns out, while all light pollution is bad for astrophysics, the low-pressure sodium lamps are least bad because their contamination can be easily subtracted from telescope data. In a model of cooperation, the entire city of Tucson, Arizona, the nearest large municipality to the Kitt Peak National Observatory, has, by agreement with the local astrophysicists, converted all its streetlights to low-pressure sodium lamps.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

308. “The people talking on their cell phone and following GPS instructions to where grandma’s house is saying I don’t need space – excuse me, that’s how you know where grandma lives, and when to make the left turn.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

309. “You get to say that the Earth is flat because we live in a country that guarantees your free speech. But it’s not a country that guarantees that anything you say is correct.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

310. “And the cosmos ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

311. “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.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

312. “In a trillion or so years, anyone alive in our own galaxy may know nothing of other galaxies. Our observable universe will merely comprise a system of nearby, long-lived stars within the Milky Way. And beyond this starry night will lie an endless void – darkness in the face of the deep.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

313. “The universe is hilarious! Like, Venus is 900 degrees. I could tell you it melts lead. But that’s not as fun as saying, ‘You can cook a pizza on the windowsill in nine seconds.’ And next time my fans eat pizza, they’re thinking of Venus!”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

314. “Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

315. “As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn’t really overturn a science paradigm.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

316. “I can tell you about the universe, but she feels it; and when you feel the universe, it has a whole other meaning to you. Otherwise, you just put a Wiki page on camera. You can learn something, but it won’t mean anything to you later on.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

318. “In the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

319. “I’d rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

320. “There’s a saying in the scientific community, that every great truth goes through three phases. First, people deny it. Second, they say that it conflicts with the Bible. Third, they say that they’ve known it all along.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

321. “The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

322. “A state of negative energy means that you are essentially getting something for nothing.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

323. “Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

324. “I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody’s easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

325. “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.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

326. “You can picture the universe as an enormous loaf of raisin bread rising in the oven.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

327. “First of all, as you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don’t. But actually, there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren’t.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

328. “After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

329. “Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

330. “There are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace – a physicist is a trained problem solver.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

331. “So dark matter is our frenemy. We have no clue what it is. It’s kind of annoying. But we desperately need it in our calculations to arrive at an accurate description of the universe. Scientists are generally uncomfortable whenever we must base our calculations on concepts we don’t understand, but we’ll do it if we have to. And dark matter is not our first rodeo.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

332. “The persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what’s going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

333. “I want people to see that the cosmic perspective is simultaneously honest about the universe we live in and uplifting, when we realize how far we have come and how wonderful is this world of ours.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

335. “Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

336. “As important as the civil rights movement was, I think what will rise to the top is that we left Earth in that time.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

337. “You can’t have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That’s a recipe for disaster. And I don’t mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

338. “Uranus was almost named George.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

339. “Space is the ultimate frontier. I think when people historically thought of the frontier, there was where you were living and then there was some edge beyond which no one had explored.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

340. “The problem comes when religion enters the science classroom. There’s no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling preachers what to teach. Scientists don’t picket churches. By and large – though it may not look this way today – science and religion have achieved peaceful coexistence for quite some time. In fact, the greatest conflicts in the world are not between religion and science; they’re between religion and religion.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

341. “Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

342. “We begin with the stars, then ascend up and away out to the galaxy, the universe, and beyond. What did Buzz Lightyear say in Toy Story? “To Infinity and Beyond!” It’s a big universe. I.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

343. “Since four coordinates are needed, we know that we live in a four-dimensional universe.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

344. “Evidence my 14yr old daughter is geek-literate: In lieu of OK, one might type K while texting. She instead typed “Potassium”.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

345. “If there’s some kind of rock star status, would I be irresponsible if I didn’t somehow use it for a continued greater good? I’m always involved in some way with reaching the public.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

346. “Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food. There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

347. “The depth of experience fine wine can bring to a dinner, particularly a bottle that has been through the past 100 years, makes you take stock of your own life.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

348. “When you are 31 years, 7 months, 9 hours, 4 minutes, and 20 seconds old, you’ve lived your billionth second.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

349. “Filling out the entire electromagnetic spectrum, in order of low-energy and low-frequency to high-energy and high-frequency, we have: radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ROYGBIV, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

350. “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.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson