Great Throughts Treasury

"I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime"

"I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world."

"I?m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don?t care about your economic background. 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?ve come to conclude that Fettucini Alfredo is just Mac-and-Cheese for food snobs."

"I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations."

"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."

"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."

"I would encourage you to not become attached to the number of things. There?s no physics in the number of things."

"If all that you see, do, measure and discover is the will of a deity, then ideas can never be proven wrong, you have no predictive power, and you are at a loss to understand the principles behind most of the fundamental interconnections of nature."

"I'd ask [God] why he keeps trying to kill us all with disease, pestilence, and natural disasters. I'd ask why 99% of all species there ever were are now extinct -- if God works in mysterious ways, that way is mysteriously genocidal."

"If each dead person became a ghost, there?d be more than 100-billion of them haunting us all. Creepy, but cool."

"If aliens did visit us, I?d be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy."

"If an alien lands on your front lawn and extends an appendage as a gesture of greeting, before you get friendly, toss it an eightball. If the appendage explodes, then the alien was probably made of antimatter. If not, then you can proceed to take it to your leader."

"If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight."

"If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. ? If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can?t help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you?ll be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, Don?t you need a vacation?!, and you don?t even know what the word vacation means because what you?re doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation ? that?s the state of mind of somebody who?s doing what others might call visionary and brilliant."

"If gridiron were a timeline, w/ Big Bang at one goal, then cavemen to now spans thickness of single turf-blade at other goal."

"If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist."

"If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread."

"If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians."

"If Pizza sizes were given in area not diameter, you?d see instantly that a 7 inch is less than half the size of a 10 inch pie"

"If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station."

"If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist."

"If the surviving miners are heroes (rather than victims) then what do you call the NASA and Chilean Engineers who saved them?"

"If that's how you want invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that is getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on."

"If the world is something you accept rather than interpret, then you're susceptible to the influence of charismatic idiots."

"If we don't act , we're just standing still. And the act of standing still is the same as moving backwards when everyone else is in motion all around us, around the world."

"If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can visit the sky together."

"If we find life out there, and it's not us, we will deem it not intelligent. But what may be equally as likely is that we find life that's vastly more intelligent than we are. If that's the case, we are putty in their hands."

"If we?re trying to go into the 21st century and be competitive, we can?t just believe we?ll be competitive."

"If you board an aircraft built according to science?with principles that have survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong?you have a far better chance of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology."

"If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument."

"If you removed all the arteries, veins, and capillaries from a person?s body, and tied them end-to-end? the person will die."

"If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth."

"If you only think of me during Black History Month, I must be failing as an educator and as an astrophysicist."

"If you ask adults how many teachers ? out of the scores in elementary, middle school, high school, college and graduate school ? made a singular impression on who and what they are, it's never more than three or four teachers. Everybody else is a distant second to this set."

"If you start wielding a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. And maybe they?re not. Maybe it's more subtle than that. And so your toolkit has to be able to morph into what is necessary for what it is that you confront at that moment."

"If you slid Pluto to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail. Now that's no kind of behavior for a planet."

"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."

"If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans."

"If your ego starts out, 'I am important, I am big, I am special,' you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No, you're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth."

"If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist."

"If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it's not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true."

"If you're going to lead a space frontier, it has to be government; it'll never be private enterprise. Because the space frontier is dangerous, and it's expensive, and it has unquantified risks. And under those conditions, you cannot establish a capital-market evaluation of that enterprise. You can't get investors."

"Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure."

"I'm baffled all the time. We don't know what's driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe."

"I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments."

"I'm not as famous as Stephen Hawking, but certainly in the U.S., I have a very high profile for a scientist. It is an awesome responsibility, one that I don't shoulder lightly."

"I'm often asked - and occasionally in an accusatory way - 'Are you atheist?' And it's like, 'You know, the only 'ist' I am is a scientist, all right?' I don't associate with movements. I'm not an 'ism.' I just - I think for myself."

"I'm constantly claimed by atheists. I find this intriguing. In fact, on my Wiki page - I didn't create the Wiki page, others did, and I'm flattered that people cared enough about my life to assemble it - and it said, 'Neil deGrasse is an atheist.'"

"I'm often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period."