Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Quotes by and about Neil deGrasse Tyson

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Tyson: "I am driven by [the urge] ... to lessen the suffering of others."

[On becoming and astrophysicist:] Tyson: "Astrophysics is not the first subject you think of ... to somehow improve the situation of the underprivileged in the world. ... [I] had some doubts as to whether I was doing the right thing."

Tyson: "[When studying astrophysics] I had this guilt that maybe [by pursuing physics] I wasn't doing all I could to help others."

Tyson: "You [should] want to make a difference in the world. If you don't want to make a difference in the world, then what are you here for?"

Tyson: "Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking [something new] and expressing it, somehow."

Tyson: "No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor ... as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship."

Tyson: "Some of the greatest poetry is revealing ... something that was so simple you had taken it for granted."

Tyson: "[I lament that] there are street artists. Street musicians. Street actors. But there are no street physicists. A little known secret is that a physicist is one of the most employable people in the marketplace."

Tyson: "[Even if you discover something completely new] somebody else would have discovered [it] afterwards. It's that simple. Your creativity is not a boundless creativity."

Tyson: "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. [Improving that number is] at the top of my list."

Tyson: "There remains a [lamentable] culture that equates high grades with success in school and correlates success in school with success in life."

Tyson: "If I were a contestant [on Jeopardy], I'm sure I would make the first few rounds, but would surely lose in any tournament. The people who win these things have a different brain wiring than I have. Part of me echoes Einstein's edict: never memorize what you can look up in a book."

Geoffry Wilson: "He could read aloud from a phone book and it would be fascinating."