Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

As chairman of the Senate subcommittee responsible for NASA appropriations, I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy.

The U.S. federal government may be going broke, but it's not because of NASA.

If the American taxpayer knew how much they paid per person to put Neil Armstrong on the moon they would never have paid it. It was hidden from them deliberately because the costs were astronomical.

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

I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon...Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported.

I can honestly say - and it's a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.

We actually look to the scientific community to kind of come back to NASA and tell us what the priorities should be. And then at NASA, we try to look within our budget and say, 'What can we accommodate, and what are the most important things for the nation?'

The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.

To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.

Space is an inspirational concept that allows you to dream big.

Space is something which makes us question our role here on Earth. It brings out the best of our hopes and dreams.

Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.

It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.

We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there's the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there's the science space part of NASA, and there's also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.

I don't think I could advocate for increasing NASA's budget by a factor of two or ten, because I want us to have good roads in our country. I want us to have good education in our country. And NASA's budget is part of a discretionary budget, and we can't make that bigger without taking away other things.

While NASA talks about 'Are we alone?' as a number one question, they are putting zero money into searching for intelligent life. There's a big disconnect there.

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

Let go of your expectations. The universe will do what it will. Sometimes your dreams will come true. Sometimes they won't. Sometimes when you let go of a broken dream, another one gently takes its place. Be aware of what is, not what you would like to be, taking place.

I was an eight-year-old kid when I watched the first Apollo Moon Landing way back in 1969 and there was something about that moment that really stuck in my head. I'd always been interested in space and flying and I was building model rockets and model airplanes, but something about that moment, I can remember like it was yesterday watching the Apollo Lunar Lander approach the surface of the Moon and then later watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take the first steps on the Moon, and something that day started the dream for me that, hey, I want to be like those guys.

Dreams are more powerful than facts.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.

Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do. ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed.

Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.