Quote collection
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"That the north star is the brightest in the night sky. I'd guess about 9 out of 10 people think this. But it does not require a grant from the National Science Foundation to learn the answer. The North Star is not even in the top 40 in the night sky. It's the 49th brightest star. Rather dull and boring by most measures."
"The value of the space program is beyond science, it's beyond military; it's a cultural shift in how we think of our place in the universe."
"For me, one of the most fertile consequences of the space program is the extent to which it stimulates people to innovate because they want to create a different tomorrow than what they're living in today. And it's that culture of innovation that spawns entirely new economies."
"When you advance a frontier and you do tomorrow what's never been done today, you have to innovate to make that happen. You become an innovation culture. When I grew up, every time I turned around it was, "Oh, here's the longest bridge or the deepest tunnel or the fastest airplane." And I originally thought that was just kind of like a pissing contest with men with too much testosterone. And then I realized that to make the tallest building you have to innovate. To make the fastest train you have to design the train in a way that it's never been designed before."
"The educated elite is not without their own actual snobbery. And I kind of an anti-elitist in that regard."
"A successful day for me is when I teach people something. They become enlightened by an idea and learn how to think about it, so that later on when someone says, "Tell me about x, y, z," they don't have to say, "I know this because Tyson told me." No, they'll say, "Here's why it's true because I know and understand it.""
"Just before I said I wanted to be an astronomer I said I wanted to be a baseball player. I was quite athletic at the time, probably because I was bigger than other kids, and if you're bigger than other kids and you're 11 you win everything."
"Let's create a World's Fair that captures everybody's visions of tomorrow together and let's celebrate that vision. Let's have articles on it with illustrators imagining how we'd be living differently."
"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."
"When I would lose matches, I fully respected the person who beat me, because they beat me. I can't blame anybody."
"It would be great if we were on multiple planets, but I think that's unrealistic. Hawking says we have to be on multiple planets so an asteroid could come and you'd still have some humans left. It's a nice idea. It satisfies the multiple-eggs-in-multiple-baskets concept."
"I think the material that inspires artists is the fabric of the soul of civilization."
"The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think."
"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."
"One trait stands out in nearly all meteorites: metal; they've got it. So, the best way to find a meteorite is to hear it first."
"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."
"Science is not just 'Here are some facts, learn that'. There's a thread through these stories that, if you know how to tell it because you know how they connect, then it's a thread that will land right in your mind, body and soul."
"Science, and its impact on a person's livelihood is the common denominator."
"The history of science shows that great mysteries get solved. It may be that there's an answer that humans are too stupid to understand. I'm intrigued by that possibility."
"As important as the civil rights movement was, I think what will rise to the top is that we left Earth in that time."