Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

I think, collectively, we should be paying more attention to what is going on around us in the world among people who don't have the advantages that we have.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

I'm aware that not all kids can pick up and fly to Panama. I'm very lucky.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but I grew up with a lot of opportunities that many people don't have.

My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I've had with opportunities my students aren't given and how profoundly unfair that is.

Barriers today are largely class-based - income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.

I do have a lot of care, concern, and compassion for disadvantaged people.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.

When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.

I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

You can't start taking away benefits if people don't have any opportunities.

If life were like a competitive race, some people would be given a flying start and others would line up with weights tied to their ankles.

Poor people always lose in struggles.

You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

When you come from an under-privileged background, oftentimes, you feel a little overwhelmed by your education or your lack of.

It was surreal to step out of my own existence and see how most American children experience things.

I had, probably, a more challenging experience growing up than most middle-class chicks.