Neil deGrasse Tyson

I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: __ave you HEARD THIS?

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, __ see you__e an astrophysicist. What__ that?_ I answer, __strophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe__he Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing._ Then he asks, __hat do you teach at Princeton?_ and I say, __ teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony._ Five minutes later, I__ on the street. A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we__ like to ask the court, and I say, __es, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1.7 grams. The __housand_ cancels with the __illi-_ and you get 1.7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime._ Again I__ out on the street.

There__ as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.

In our profession, we tend to name things exactly as we see them. Big red stars we call red giants. Small white stars we call white dwarfs. When stars are made of neutrons, we call them neutron stars. Stars that pulse, we call them pulsars. In biology they come up with big Latin words for things. MDs write prescriptions in a cuneiform that patients can__ understand, hand them to the pharmacist, who understands the cuneiform. It__ some long fancy chemical thing, which we ingest. In biochemistry, the most popular molecule has ten syllables__eoxyribonucleic acid! Yet the beginning of all space, time, matter, and energy in the cosmos, we can describe in two simple words, Big Bang. We are a monosyllabic science, because the universe is hard enough. There is no point in making big words to confuse you further.Want more? In the universe, there are places where the gravity is so strong that light doesn__ come out. You fall in, and you don__ come out either: black hole. Once again, with single syllables, we get the whole job done. Sorry, but I had to get all that off my chest.

If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person__ body, and tied them end-to-end_the person will die.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

To make any future that we dreamt up real requires creative scientists, engineers, and technologists to make it happen. If people are not within your midst who dream about tomorrow - with the capacity to bring tomorrow into the present - then the country might as well just recede back into the cave because that's where we're headed.

You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.

We live in the kind of society where, in almost all cases, hard work is rewarded.

I think the greatest of people in society carved niches that represented the unique expression of their combinations of talents, and if everyone had the luxury of expressing the unique combinations of talents in this world, our society would be transformed overnight.

I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.

The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe.

... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.

Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or make you give up.