Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Washington and Jefferson were both rich Virginia planters, but they were never friends.

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.

I believe the American people are more concerned with a man's views and abilities than with the church to which he belongs. I believe the founding fathers meant it when they provided in Article VI of the Constitution that there should be no religious test for public office. And I believe that the American people mean to adhere to those principles today.

Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.

It is false to suggest that Thomas Jefferson or any other Founding Father believed in a legal barrier to God in the public square.

It is my firm belief that the God of Heaven raised up the founding fathers and inspired them to establish the Constitution of this land. This is part of my religious faith. To me this is not just another nation. It is a great and glorious nation with a divine mission to perform for liberty-loving people everywhere.

Today the separation of church and state is America is used to silence the church... The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent... It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas... To have suggested the state separated from religion and religious influence would have amazed the Founding Fathers.

Thomas Jefferson understood the greater purpose of the liberty that our Founding Fathers sought during the creation of our Nation. Although it was against the British that the colonists fought for political rights, the true source of the rights of man was clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote that all humans are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . . It was self-evident to him that denying these rights was wrong and that he and others must struggle to win what was theirs.

People don't even recognize who the Founding Fathers of the United States were. They were exceptional human beings - when you signed the Declaration of Independence, that was a death warrant they signed their name to. You have to have courage to put your name on a death warrant against the most powerful nation in the world at that time. And yet, we didn't honor who they really were. They were deists. They lived an enlightened belief system.

When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself.

When the uncultured man sees a stone in the road it tells him no story other than the fact that he sees a stone ... The scientist looking at the same stone perhaps will stop, and with a hammer break it open, when the newly exposed faces of the rock will have written upon them a history that is as real to him as the printed page.

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

Thomas Jefferson declared, stating that he was speaking on behalf of the other founding fathers, ...(that) we should build a wall between the church and state.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering.

There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.

Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again - the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years.

Religious traditions hold enormous value, extraordinary wisdom, breathtaking insights into the human experience, but they are limited to the degree that there has not been a new theological idea expressed by any of the major religions for thousands of years.

It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community.

Father's Day is important because, besides being the day on which we honor Dad, it's the one day of the year that Brookstone does any business.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

In the past thirty years we have learned more about the workings of the human brain than in all of previous history.

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

Although I was four years at the University [of Wisconsin], I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany and and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned, and should have stayed longer.