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Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: October 5
Actor
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Physicist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Teacher
Trekkie
The Bronx
New York City
Neil Tyson
Scientists
Scientist
Wouldn
Already
Knew
Anything
Every
Exploration
Discovering

More quotes by Neil deGrasse Tyson

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The miniaturization of electronics, which ultimately was driven by the marketplace, was started by NASA, because it costs money to get something into orbit. So you want to trim your electronics, miniaturize your electronics, miniaturize your satellites.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun's green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Knowledge of the natural world and how it works should be counted as fundamental to informed governance. You can't have a functioning democracy, if the electorate is under-informed or, worse, mis-informed.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I think everyone should have a personal mission to leave the Earth a better place for them having lived in it and let Earth then take it from there.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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For me, one of the most fertile consequences of the space program is the extent to which it stimulates people to innovate because they want to create a different tomorrow than what they're living in today. And it's that culture of innovation that spawns entirely new economies.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Whether or not you can never become great at something, you can always become better at it. Don't ever forget that! And don’t say “I’ll never be good”. You can become better! and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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In the animal kingdom, one of the keys to survival is to outwit your enemies. And when you're surrounded by carnivores, one of the best strategies is to fade into the background and disappear.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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When we try to look farther into the universe we come to what appears to be the end of space but actually it's the beginning of time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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It's my duty to enlighten people.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You say you're worried about kids? I'm not worried about kids, I'm worried about grown ups... Children are not the problem here... We spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I don't ever tell people what to do! Even if it seems and feels that way sometimes, I don't think I should tell a person how to spend their money. I try not to tell people what to read.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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We still refer to sunrise, sunset. That only has meaning if you think that Earth is in the center of things, and everything is moving around us. So even though we know intellectually Earth goes around the sun, the language is still pre-Copernican, as we would call it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Deep down within anyone there's a flame that maybe had gone dormant that can be fanned or ignited in case it had blown out. This is the flame of curiosity, the flame of wonder, of awe, of all the things that make you want to learn something more tomorrow than you knew today.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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The limits on your enlightenment come not from the age you stopped going to school but from the age you stopped being curious.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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UV is bad for molecules because its high energy breaks the bonds between a molecule's constituent atoms. That's why UV is bad for you, too: it's always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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I object to religion in science classrooms not because it's religion but because it's not science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson