Great Throughts Treasury

"Half of my library is old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong."

"Halley shattered their monopoly, beating them at their own game. A game that no scientist had ever played before: Prophecy."

"How do we change the way science is taught? Ask anybody how many teachers truly made a difference in their life, and you never come up with more than the fingers on one hand. You remember their names, you remember what they did, you remember how they moved in front of the classroom. You know why you remember them? Because they were passionate about the subject. You remember them because they lit a flame within you. They got you excited about a subject you didn't previously care about, because they were excited about it themselves. That's what turns people on to careers in science and engineering and mathematics. That's what we need to promote. Put that in every classroom, and it will change the world."

"How do you study something that cannot possibly get your clothes dirty? How do astrophysicists know anything about either the universe or its contents if all the objects to be studied are light-years away? Fortunately, the light emanating from a star reveals much more to us than its position in the sky or how bright it is."

"However, every advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck of dust, orbiting a mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort of galaxy, among a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche."

"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.'"

"I always try to get people a different outlook. When you do that, people take ownership of the information. They don't ever have to reference me because, I'd like to believe as an educator, I'm empowering them to have those thoughts themselves."

"I can't gather around and talk about how much everybody in the room doesn't believe in God. I just don't - I don't have the energy for that, and so I... Agnostic separates me from the conduct of atheists whether or not there is strong overlap between the two categories, and at the end of the day I'd rather not be any category at all."

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

"I am trying to convince people--not only the public, but lawmakers and people in power--that investing in the frontier of science, however remote it may seem in its relevance to what you're doing today, is a way of stockpiling the seed corns of future harvests of this nation... Advancing a frontier--history has shown--has advanced a culture ever since the industrial revolution got underway."

"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."

"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."

"I claim that all those who think they can cherry-pick science simply don't understand how science works. That's what I claim. And if they did, they'd be less prone to just assert that somehow scientists are clueless."

"I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves."

"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."

"I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me."

"I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you."

"I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they've got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. Because that's when we're going to fight."

"I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking."

"I don?t have an issue with what you do in the church, but I?m gonna be up in your face if you?re gonna knock on my science classroom and tell me they?ve got to teach what you?re teaching in your Sunday school. Because that?s when we?re gonna fight!"

"I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case."

"I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before."

"I don't comment on the physics errors of 'Star Wars,' all right. I just - you let that one go."

"I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another."

"I get enormous satisfaction from knowing I'm doing something for society."

"I enjoy knowing where we are, where we came from, and where we're going. And those questions are answered from space... So it's not that the universe would be different if NASA never existed. It's that we would be different in a way that I don't even wanna think about."

"I have a personal philosophy in life: if somebody else can do something that I'm doing, they should do it. And what I want to do is find things that would represent a unique contribution to the world -- the contribution that only I, and my portfolio of talents, can make happen. Those are my priorities in life."

"I knew Pluto was popular among elementary schoolkids, but I had no idea they would mobilize into a 'Save Pluto' campaign. I now have a drawer full of hate letters from hundreds of elementary schoolchildren (with supportive cover letters from their science teachers) pleading with me to reverse my stance on Pluto. The file includes a photograph of the entire third grade of a school posing on their front steps and holding up a banner proclaiming, 'Dr. Tyson?Pluto is a Planet!?"

"I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge."

"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: ?Have you HEARD THIS?"

"I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up?many people feel small, because they?re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars."

"I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know."

"I like to believe that science is becoming mainstream. It should have never been something that sort of geeky people do and no one else thinks about. Whether or not, it will always be what geeky people do. It should, as a minimum, be what everybody thinks about because science is all around us."

"I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard?explored not only with robots, but with the mind, body, and soul of our species."

"I love the smell of the universe in the morning."

"I said that if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell them that we fight wars to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to run our transportation. They'd be like, 'What?'"

"I simply go with what works. And what works is the healthy skepticism embodied in the scientific method. Believe me, if the Bible had ever been shown to be a rich source of scientific answers and enlightenment, we would be mining it daily for cosmic discovery."

"I see all this talk about jobs going overseas as a symptom of the absence of innovation. And the absence of innovation is a symptom of there being no major national priority to advance a frontier."

"I never got into 'Star Wars.' Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all."

"I study the universe. It's the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time."

"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 many people have that enthusiasm, but they are prevented from being teachers because they didn't go through the teacher mill. Now you have teachers who have been through the teacher mill, yet they have no capacity to inspire anyone at all. It's the inspired student that continues to learn on their own. That's what separates the real achievers in the world from those who pedal along, finishing assignments."

"I think of space not as the final frontier but as the next frontier. Not as something to be conquered but to be explored."

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

"I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine."

"I think the greatest teachers are not the ones that are best trained at educational tactics. I don't know a person who's ever said, "Boy, that teacher is so good! The teacher gives such good exams. That teacher gives such good homework sets!" No one has said that about a great teacher. That's not what people remember about the great teachers they've had."

"I try to show the public that chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics is life. It is not some separate subject that you have to be pulled into a corner to be taught about."

"I want to know what dark matter and dark energy are comprised of. They remain a mystery, a complete mystery. No one is any closer to solving the problem than when these two things were discovered."

"I want people to see that the cosmic perspective is simultaneously honest about the universe we live in and uplifting, when we realize how far we have come and how wonderful is this world of ours."

"I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don?t."