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" We live on this speck called Earth - think about what you might do, today or tomorrow - and make the most of it. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Earth
Live
You
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" You can't come away with this cosmic perspective thinking that you are better than others and want to fight. That's why you'll never have astrophysicists leading nations into war. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Perspective
War
You
" Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Together
Speak
Need
" So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown, lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Discovery
Moment
God
" The only way you can invent tomorrow is if you break out of the enclosure that the school system has provided for you by the exams written by people who are trained in another generation. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
People
School
Tomorrow
" If you think of feelings you have when you are awed by something - for example, knowing that elements in your body trace to exploded stars - I call that a spiritual reaction, speaking of awe and majesty, where words fail you. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Spiritual
Stars
Think
" If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Looking
Research
Scientist
" Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Nature
Technology
Earth
" When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there's nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
More
Plan
Solution
" With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, 'Oh, let's build a robot' and what's the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That's so 1950s. We are so past that. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
People
Look
Early
" Although I'm not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Story
Movies
Well
" In all civilizations we've studied, all cultures that we know of across the Earth and across time have invested some kind of attempt to understanding where where, where they come from, and where they are going. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Earth
Time
Kind
" Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.' "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Empathy
World
Reading
" Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up at the universe; we feel large. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Does
Universe
Up
" For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Culture
Influence
Innovation
" I claim that space is part of our culture. You've heard complaints that nobody knows the names of the astronauts, that nobody gets excited about launches, that nobody cares anymore except people in the industry. I don't believe that for a minute. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
People
Space
Culture
" NASA has spin-offs, and it's a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Surgery
NASA
List
" Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Poetry
Intelligence
Science
" Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Nobody
Special
Impact
" I was an aspiring astrophysicist, and that's how I defined myself, not by my skin color. People didn't treat me as someone with science ambitions. They treated me as someone they thought was going to mug them, or who was a shoplifter. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Myself
Treat
Thought
" You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Me
Best
Think
" Most religious people in America fully embrace science. So the argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small fraction of those who declare that they are religious. They just happen to be a very vocal fraction, so you got the impression that there are more of them than there actually is. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Small
Science
Religion
" All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
NASA
Technology
You
" I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that's hard to do for a city kid because when you look up you just see buildings - and really, your first thought is to look in people's windows. So to look out of the space - out of living space - and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
People
Look
Space
" 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. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Vote
People
Decisions
" I'm perennially intrigued how people who lead largely evidence-based lives can, in a belief-based part of their mind, be certain that an invisible, divine entity created an entire universe just for us, or that the government is stockpiling space aliens in a secret desert location. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Desert
Space
Government
" No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Two
Poor
Culture
" The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Living
Furniture
Space
" My parents didn't know much science; in fact, they didn't know science at all. But they could recognize a science book when they saw it, and they spent a lot of time at bookstores, combing the remainder tables for science books to buy for me. I had one of the biggest libraries of any kid in school, built on books that cost 50 cents or a dollar. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
School
Parents
Me
" Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
World
Children
Curious
" I can't tell you how many people say they were turned off from science because of a science teacher that completely sucked out all the inspiration and enthusiasm they had for the course. "
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Teacher
People
Tell