Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.

Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

Be Skeptical, but learn to listen.

Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.

By doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth.

I always say I have a Socratic approach to most things that I do. I pummel people with questions, because I need to know what they're thinking, what they're trying to achieve, what they believe the final outcome is going to be.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

The real question, therefore, is not whether students should be taught to think critically and self-reflectively, but instead what they should be thinking critically about.

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.

Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to break the bank of our answers.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

Since I was a child, I started to ask very difficult questions; even my family was telling me all the time, 'You're a very difficult person, and we were having trouble answering your questions. Why are you asking so many questions?'

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Oxford also taught me something else - it taught me scepticism.

Mostly, I try to take a rational approach to life.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.