We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.

Geek e-mail sign-off: No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

One should not be too distracted by definitions. Ideas transcend definitions.

Seems the World goes batshit crazy, every few decades. Just long enough to forget the last time the World went batshit crazy.

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

It’s part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.

No doubt about it, we’re smarter than every other living creature that ever ran, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that?

The last person I ever want working for me is someone who says ’that’s not in my job description.

The universe is so amazing and so limitless, who wouldn’t want to study the universe?

There’s a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.

I’d bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.

If Neptune were analogized with a Chevy Impala in mass, then how big is Pluto compared to that? Pluto would be a matchbox car sitting on the curb.

We didn’t go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we’re Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat.

Only when creative people take ownership of cosmic discovery will society accept science as the cultural activity that it is.

Earth has also tidally locked the Moon, leaving it with identical periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around Earth. Wherever and whenever this happens, the locked moon shows only one face to its host planet.

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people’s knowledge.

If the universe is anything, it should be fun.

Never presume that just because you disagree with an idea that you must be correct.

Odd how often blood is shed to obtain freedom from those in power. Oppressors must be the most insecure people in the world.

Modern science is under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of your five senses.

The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It’s a slightly bigger moon; I ain’t using the adjective ‘supermoon.’

The most successful scientists in the history of the world are those who posed the right questions.

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.

For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested.

You don’t want to raise a kid in a culture where the kid who asks the most questions is annoying. You want a culture where the kid who asks the most questions gets awards and gets another piece of cake.

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.

If a particle can fall into a black hole, it can come out of a white hole.

I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our existence.

Emotional truths woven by lawyers in the court of law are apparently more important than the truths of actual events. I have grown to fear for those whose innocence became trapped within the legal system.

I can’t think that leaving Earth once is enough.

Everyone has all different experiences in school. I just know that throughout my life, at no time did any teacher ever point to me and say, hey. He’ll go far.

Next time you’re stunned by a large moon on the horizon, bend over and view it between your legs. The effect goes away entirely.

The first trillionaire will be the person who exploits space resources on asteroids, on comets.

As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.

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.

Miniaturization of electronics started by NASA’s push became an entire consumer products industry. Now we’re carrying the complete works of Beethoven on a lapel pin listening to it in headphones.

NASA has spin-offs, and it’s a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery.

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.

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.

The chances that your tombstone will read ‘Killed by Asteroid’ are about the same as they’d be for ‘Killed in Airplane Crash.’

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.

I object to religion in science classrooms not because it’s religion but because it’s not science.

Grab something off the shelf that’s on the spaceship-an ashtray, it doesn’t matter what. Because I can tell you, if they flew here from another galaxy, no matter what you’ve pulled off the shelf, it’ll be unlike anything we have on Earth.

The Speed of Light: It’s Not Just a Good Idea It’s the Law. Unlike.

If you seek only easy problems to solve, then ultimately, there’ll be nothing about you to distinguish yourself from others.

I didn’t even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don’t know that they’re there, you don’t know that you’re missing them.

In some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the eternal transition from the past to the future.

The universe is knowable and what one need not apeal to mystical, magical forces to account for things.

The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual – even redemptive – but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.

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.

It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle’s falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!

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

My favorite parody of this gesture was a skit on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, shortly after the Voyager launch, in which they showed a written reply from the aliens who recovered the spacecraft. The note simply requested, “Send more Chuck Berry.

The tenacity of life is mind-boggling. We keep finding it where no one thought it could be.

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

Gamma rays are the sort of radiation you should avoid. Want proof? Just remember how the comic strip character “The Hulk” became big, green, and ugly.

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out – and we have only just begun.

I love the future we might invent for ourselves that I have not yet dreamt of.

Bosons, by the way, are named for the Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose.

God displayed a sense of humor when he configured the region between our legs an entertainment complex built around a sewage system.

To believe in a universe as young as 6- or 7,000 years old, is to extinguish the light of most of the galaxy.

Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

I’m not criticizing the science in Star Wars. That’s a waste of everybody’s time.

The worst thing that ever happened to America was the 19th Amendment.

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.

For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.

And extracting one molecule’s signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler’s voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It’s hard, but you can do it.

What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

If it’s a new planet, sign me up. I’m tired of driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in orbit around earth-give me a place to go and I’ll go.

And yes, every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out – and we have only just begun.

I’ve accomplished enough in life so that I do not fear death.

You realize when you know how to think, it empowers you far beyond those who only know what to think.

I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religions document.

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled.

With no gravitational force to work against, your body not only doesn’t need the same amount of muscle and bone, it starts breaking them down. As on Earth, so in space: use it or lose it. And exercise may not solve the problem.

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.

Part of knowing how to think is knowing how the laws of nature shape the world around us. Without that knowledge, without that capacity to think, you can easily become a victim of people who seek to take advantage of you.

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

Your center of mass is a place you cannot visit but you always carry with you. Like memories, it is part of life’s baggage.

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.

I want to encourage people to not think in terms of gifts, but think in terms of, wow. You work hard to succeed at that, because that’s exactly what I do.

Revelation replaced investigation.

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

The limits on your enlightenment come not from the age you stopped going to school but from the age you stopped being curious.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.

Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do.

Many people feel small because they’re small and the universe is big, but I feel big.

Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It’s not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks.

So not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

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

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That’s why my public focus is primarily adults.

Some air you inhale was exhaled by Cleopatra.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

When Kennedy said, ‘Let’s go to the moon,’ we didn’t yet have a vehicle that wouldn’t kill you on launch. He said we’ll land a man on the moon in eight years and bring him back. That was an audacious goal to put forth in front of the American people.

Wanna lose 1200 Calories a month? Drink a liter of ice water a day. You burn the energy just raising the water to body temp.

Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up at the universe; we feel large.

There’s no shame in admitting what you don’t know. The only shame is pretending you know all the answers.

In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

We went to the moon and discovered earth.

Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.

It is the knowledge that I’m going to die that creates the focus that I bring to being alive; the urgency of accomplishment; the need to express love; now, not later. If we live forever, why ever even get out of bed in the morning? Cause you always have tomorrow. That’s not the kind of life I want to lead.

The day that you stop looking – because you’re content God did it – I don’t need you in the lab. You’re useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.

Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children.

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.

Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It’s the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

The past is another planet.

When I Was Your  Age: People were never “living with their disease.” We cured them. Or they died from it.

We need more science in the world. Train me.

If there’s something that someone else can do, let them do it. If I couldn’t do it uniquely, let someone else do it and I would get back to the lab.

It’s better to understand something than to memorize something.

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.

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.

Everything we do, every thought we’ve ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find.

Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.

In five billion years, the sun will expand and engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.

Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg, laid by a bird that was not a chicken.

I as an astrophysicist, see the universe, feel the universe, smell the universe every day. Every day. And for people to say, I’m cool, I’m right here, it’s all I need.

Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets.

If the Sun exploded, we wouldn’t know about it for 8 minutes and 20 seconds. Light and gravity take that long to reach us. Then we would vaporize.

Words that make questions may not be questions at all.

A conspiracy theorist is a person who tacitly admits that they have insufficient data to prove their points. A conspiracy is a battle cry of a person with insufficient data.

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

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

Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That’s a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing.

The iron from that meteorite and the iron from your blood have common origin in the core of a star.

The Big Bang Theory: When geeky scientists can be main characters in a hit prime time series, you know there’s hope for the world.

If cosmological theory were dominated by women, who are no strangers to cycles, how can we know for sure that we wouldn’t then be told that the oscillating universe is the more aesthetically fulfilling alternative?

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don’t expect.

Santa knows Physics: Of all colors, Red Light penetrates fog best. That’s why Benny the Blue-nosed reindeer never got the gig.

I fear living a life where I could have accomplished something and didn’t. That’s what I fear. I don’t fear death.

No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science.

When NASA says they’re going into space, they don’t mean up and back. They mean orbit.

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.

Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.

Science is not a subject you took in school. It’s life. We are wrapped by it, in it, with it.

Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.

To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.

In the end, it’s the people who are curious who change the world.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out – and we have only just begun.

Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.”

No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don’t ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.

You have the illusion of free will, but, in fact, that illusion comes about because you don’t know the future. Because you are a prisoner of the present, forever locked in transition, between the past and the future.

We’re talking about a being whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe.

When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there’s nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy.

A scientist is just a kid who never grew up.

Access to science is greater than ever before. There are more vehicles out there that grant the public access to science. Not to mention the Internet.

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It’s called the moon illusion.

It’s short-sighted to think ads won’t one day end up wherever humans are – even the moon.

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back, and only then will you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows.

I agree that we should go back to the moon and on to Mars. We should treat all objects in the solar system, including comets and asteroids, as exploration targets.

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.

Astronauts are the only kind of celebrity I know who can have a line of people waiting for their autograph, even if the line of people does not know in advance the astronaut’s name.

In physics, opinions don’t matter, only demonstrated experiments. The day the fellow succeeds, if ever, he won’t need anybody else’s opinion.

That is a big question we all have: are we alone in the universe? And exoplanets confirm the suspicion that planets are not rare.

I’ve known from long ago that the universe was calling me. If you were one of those annoying adults that said, ‘Oh, what are you gonna be when you grow up?’ I would say, ‘Astrophysicist .’ And then they’d walk away real quickly.

One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you’re right but not enough to know you’re wrong.

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong.

Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security.

I’m a little fatigued of adults saying we’ve got to worry about the kids. And these are the same adults that don’t know science and are running things and wielding resources and legislation.

As children we all wonder – we wonder all the time. And that gets lost in adulthood. It gets beaten out, it gets filtered out or diluted out.

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.

What would aliens say when told earthlings shift clocks twice a year to fool themselves into thinking there’s more sunlight?

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don’t think I’m the first to say that.

We are star dust in the highest exalted way, called by the universe, reaching out to the universe.

I think if everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionaries and brilliant.

Does the full moon affect people’s behavior, you ask? Yup. It makes people think the full moon affects people’s behavior.

People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn’t understand. It’s a sense of empowerment.

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.’

When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

For your own safety, do not ever tell an astrophysicist, I hope all your stars are twinkling.

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.

We’re a sleepy nation right now. I want us to be a nation of innovation.

The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don’t agree.

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

To learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.

It’s okay not to know all the answers. It’s better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what’s already there.

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

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.

People like death and mayhem.

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers.

The only people who should have their head examined are those who never ask questions.

Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.

Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

I’m often asked whether I believe in Global Warming. I now just reply with the question: “Do you believe in Gravity?

And behold the greatest mystery of them all: an unopened can of diet Pepsi floats in water while an unopened can of regular Pepsi sinks.

Down there between our legs, it’s like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?