I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a perfect homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. … If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can’t help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you’ll be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, “Don’t you need a vacation?!,” and you don’t even know what the word “vacation” means because what you’re doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation — that’s the state of mind of somebody who’s doing what others might call visionary and brilliant.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

If the universe is anything, it should be fun.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can visit the sky together.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astronomically richer answer might be, "I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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 terrible day on Earth.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you're going to lead a space frontier, it has to be government; it'll never be private enterprise. Because the space frontier is dangerous, and it's expensive, and it has unquantified risks. And under those conditions, you cannot establish a capital-market evaluation of that enterprise. You can't get investors.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson