Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

In the long run, much public opinion is made in the universities; ideas generated there filter down through the teaching profession and the students into the general public.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

The Wellcome Foundation offered me the chance to establish a small academic research unit, modestly funded, but with total independence. The real opportunity, however, came from King's College, London.

I went into Harvard one way and came out a different person... It's the air at Harvard; it's like a Renaissance court.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research.

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.

I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.

When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.

In recent years, more and more of my time has become absorbed by administrative work for the research council of ETH-Z of which I am presently the president.

I'm instinctively cautious because I'm an academic.

I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society.

There's a big difference between the role of an academic and the role of someone in government. That's a cliche, but in academic life if you say things that are common sense and people nod their heads, it's not very useful. You're not adding anything.

Responsibility without power, the fate of the secretary through the ages.

Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

I have more influence now than when I had the power.

I think it's really unfortunate that academics have been sidelined in most important policy debates.

I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

College professors are suspect because whenever emotion is in control, anti-intellectualism prevails.

What rules the world is ideas.

To an imagination of any scope the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.

American academia has a plethora of departments of Islamic Studies funded by Islamic governments, and geared to generating a positive image of their religion and culture … In America this is how things seem to work. If you pay for the chair then you pay for your image.