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.