Top 500 Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

352. “Yes, Einstein was a badass.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

353. “Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain’s weight.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

354. “Knowledge of the natural world and how it works should be counted as fundamental to informed governance. You can’t have a functioning democracy, if the electorate is under-informed or, worse, mis-informed.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

355. “On the equator, where centrifugal forces are greatest, a 150-pound person will be a slender 149 pounds 14 ounces.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

356. “The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

357. “When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious prescence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day- every twenty a fourth out rotation on Earth- people get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

358. “In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun’s mass.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

359. “If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don’t know.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

360. “However, every advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck of dust, orbiting a mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort of galaxy, among a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

361. “The whole society has to recognize the importance of the value in embracing what science is going into the 21st Century. Otherwise, we might as well start packing and moving back into the cave right now, because that’s where we’ll end up.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

362. “If all that you see, do, measure and discover is the will of a deity, then ideas can never be proven wrong, you have no predictive power, and you are at a loss to understand the principles behind most of the fundamental interconnections of nature.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

363. “During the quark–lepton era the universe was dense enough for the average separation between unattached quarks to rival the separation between attached quarks.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

364. “No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

365. “Distant galaxies now visible in the night sky will ultimately disappear beyond an unreachable horizon, receding from us faster than the speed of light.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

366. “Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

367. “While I’m a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it’s the real universe that calls to me. To fall into a black hole, that is more amazing than anything I’ve ever read in a science-fiction story.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

368. “The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, ‘Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.’ Which is a non-thought.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

369. “What happened before all this? What happened before the beginning? Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. In response, some religious people assert, with a tinge of righteousness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

370. “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

371. “We need to look at NASA, not as a handout, but as an investment.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

372. “With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

373. “For reasons I have yet to understand, many people don’t like chemicals, which might explain the perennial movement to rid foods of them. Perhaps sesquipedalian chemical names just sound dangerous. But in that case we should blame the chemists, and not the chemicals themselves. Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

374. “Ever since there have been people, there have been explorers, looking in places where other hadn’t been before. Not everyone does it, but we are part of a species where some members of the species do-to the benefit of us all.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

375. “We fail in even the simplest of all scientific observations-nobody looks up anymore.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

376. “The universe today is 13.8 billion years old. By 22 billion years, the Sun will have finished its main-sequence lifetime and will have become a white dwarf. The Andromeda galaxy will have crashed into the Milky Way.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

377. “I can’t tell you how many people say they were turned off from science because of a science teacher that completely sucked out all the inspiration and enthusiasm they had for the course.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

378. “Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

379. “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. What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

380. “I wonder if, in fact, we have been observed by aliens and upon close examination of human conduct and human behavior they have concluded that there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

381. “Dark matter is a mysterious substance that has gravity but does not interact with light in any known way.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

382. “What if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify – a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a super-intelligent alien species?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

383. “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

384. “You don’t take a dead cat to the vet. I mean you might, but why?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

385. “With automatic spell checkers running unleashed over what we compose, our era is that of correctly spelled typos.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

386. “I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we’re the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

387. “To declare that Earth must be the only planet in the universe with life would be inexcusably big-headed of us.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

388. “I never got into ‘Star Wars.’ Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

389. “Let’s get China to leak a memo that says they want to build military bases on Mars. We’d be on Mars in twelve months.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

390. “What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That’s not science. You can get a parrot to do that.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

391. “Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else – the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

392. “I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

393. “As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it’s not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people – theologians as well scientists – have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

394. “The history of science shows that great mysteries get solved. It may be that there’s an answer that humans are too stupid to understand. I’m intrigued by that possibility.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

395. “Don’t know if it’s good or bad that a Google search on “Big Bang Theory” lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

396. “I’d like – inviting aliens and have them observe what we do because so much of what we do that we take for granted will just be weird or extraordinary or just plain dumb when observed by an alien from another civilization.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

397. “There’s no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher, That might not necessarily be true. That’s never happened. There’re no scientists picketing outside of churches.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

398. “What do you call those knobby things on doors that help you open them?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

399. “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.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

400. “Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is water and over 99 percent is uninhabited, so you would expect nearly all impactors to hit either the ocean or desolate regions on Earth’s surface. So why do movie meteors have such good aim?”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson