deGrasse Tyson: "I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves."

deGrasse Tyson: "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."

deGrasse Tyson: "No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives."

deGrasse Tyson: "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."

deGrasse Tyson: "I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know."

deGrasse Tyson: "Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes."

deGrasse Tyson: "Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans."

deGrasse Tyson: "No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles."

deGrasse Tyson: "It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder."

deGrasse Tyson: "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. That's what scientists do every day."

deGrasse Tyson: "I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking."

deGrasse Tyson: "Every account of a higher power that I've seen described, of all religions that I've seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence."

deGrasse Tyson: "There is no greater education than one that is self-driven."

deGrasse Tyson: "Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion."

deGrasse Tyson: "The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

deGrasse Tyson: "There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It's the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end."

deGrasse Tyson: "I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge."

deGrasse Tyson: "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."

deGrasse Tyson: "Everyone should have their mind blown once a day."

deGrasse Tyson: "We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us."

deGrasse Tyson: "The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact."