Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

With science, there is this culture of experimentation, and most of the time, those experiments fail.

I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.

You need to remind people that you vote, you matter, and that they can't succeed without your help.

Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else.

While science and technology play critical roles in sustaining modern civilization, they are not part of our culture in the sense that they are not commonly studied or well comprehended. Neither the potential nor the limitations of science are understood so that what can be achieved and what is beyond reach are not comprehended.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

The government needs good science, and I’m not willing to abdicate the role of advising the Administration and Congress on [science] policy.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

The biggest hurdle that our communities have is cynicism - saying it's a done deal, who cares; there's no point to voting. If we can get somebody to care, it's a huge victory for the movement and the causes we're trying to advance.

I brought attention to the fact that people need to be more involved in politics and not just let the establishment continue to control politics.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

To use Newton's words, our efforts up till this moment have but turned over a pebble or shell here and there on the beach, with only a forlorn hope that under one of them was the gem we were seeking. Now we have the sieve, the minds, the hands, the time, and, particularly, the dedication to find those gems-no matter in which favorite hiding place the children of distant worlds have placed them.

I want people to start getting involved in voting for the Senate, Congress and local elections. I just want to see us get involved more in the political process especially when you see things like police brutality going on and different people complaining about the sheriffs whether it's in Ferguson or Missouri.

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished.

We live in a scientific age, yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the way, the how and the why for everything in our experience.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

I'm not calling for a boycott on voting. But I think it should be very clear that just voting is not going to solve our problems.

If you change the society and a culture, the politics will follow.

Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.

It is often asserted that woman owes all the advantages of the position she occupies to-day to Christianity, but the facts of history show that the Christian Church has done nothing specifically for woman's elevation. In the general march of civilization, she has necessarily reaped the advantage of man's higher development, but we must not claim for Christianity all that has been achieved by science, discovery and invention.

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilization.