Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

Adventure Age Airplane Aliens Ambition Animals Art

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Kids, Awards, Cake
No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Law, Matter, Culture
Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Fighting, Technology, Community
I don't want to die ... I don't want to die poor. Two great motivators in the history of human cultures.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Two, Funny Graduation, Culture
During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Running, Moving, Sunset
The word smart is not applied to all professions, even if you are smart in that profession. No one talks about smart lawyers. They may say a brilliant lawyer. They'll talk about a creative artist. Smart is saved for scientists. It just is. It's not even really applied to medical doctors. It applies to scientists in the lab figuring out what hadn't been figured out before.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Smart, Artist, Doctors
They all knew the mothership was coming, they all knew it was a flying saucer, they all knew it came from another planet through the vacuum of space. And so what do they do, to the left of that monument? They set up runway lights. And I'm thinking, if you could travel through the vacuum of space, you don't need runway lights. Runway lights are if you're using air for lift. Aliens would not need air for lift.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Thinking, Light, Air
Astronomers do not commonly use Venereal, in favor of the less contagious-sounding Venutian. Blame the medical community, who snatched the word long before astronomers had any good use for it. I suppose you can't blame the doctors. Venus is the goddess of beauty and love, so she ought to be the goddess of its medical consequences.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Doctors, Beauty And Love, Long

Neil Degrasse Tyson (2010). “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist”, p.33, Prometheus Books
If cosmological theory were dominated by women, who are no strangers to cycles, how can we know for sure that we wouldn't then be told that the oscillating universe is the more aesthetically fulfilling alternative?

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Culture, Alternatives, Stranger
But you will hardly ever read about them. Why? Because once again, the media has predetermined what is not worthy of coverage, even when the news item is something as uninteresting as the cosmic origin of every element in your body.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Media, Culture, News
To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist's domain-is infinitely more daunting.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Simple, Law, Cosmos

Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.36, W. W. Norton & Company
We should not measure our space-faring era by where footprints have been laid.... We should measure our era by how many people take no notice at all. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Space, People, Legacy

Neil Degrasse Tyson (2010). “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist”, p.69, Prometheus Books
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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Emotional, Law, Important

Neil Degrasse Tyson (2010). “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist”, p.94, Prometheus Books
Perhaps these ancient observatories like Stonehenge perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Stars, Moving, Moon
In the movie, the stars above the ship bear no correspondence to any constellations in a real sky. Worse yet, while the heroine bobs... we are treated to her view of this Hollywood sky-one where the stars on the right half of the scene trace the mirror image of the stars in the left half. How lazy can you get?

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Stars, Real, Bad Ass
The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth - that we have culture.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Teacher, Art, Bad Ass

"Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger". Converge Magazine, May 21, 2009.
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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Two, Culture, Fundamentals
When you innovate, you create new industries that then boost your economy. And when you create new industries and that becomes part of your culture, your jobs can't go overseas because no one else has figured out how to do it yet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Jobs, Culture, Economy
It's part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Animal, Giving, Personality

"How Smart Are Animals?". "NOVA scienceNOW", www.pbs.org. February 9, 2011.
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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Airplane, Men, Bridges

Source: blog.sfgate.com
I would rather enlighten the electorate so that when it's time for them to put somebody in Congress, it will be self-evident that they will embrace the message and tools and discovery of science in a way that can transform our culture and even our civilization.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Self, Civilization, Discovery

Source: www.avclub.com
I've found that no one complains about pop culture being a source of someone lecturing to them. If someone's telling you about Kim Kardashian, you're not going to accuse them of lecturing to you. If I can explore an intersection between pop culture and science literacy, then it generally will not come across as a lecture.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Complaining, Culture, Literacy

Source: www.esquire.com
No one is saying you're possessed by the devil anymore except the most ignorant of people in modern culture.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

People, Ignorant, Devil

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
Pop culture is the scaffold we all carry around with us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Culture, Pop Culture, Pops

Source: bookriot.com
I've always been interested in pop culture. Some of my colleagues think of pop culture as beneath them, or there's the ivory tower and then there's everybody else, and I never could buy into that wall that's been put up by so many people over the decades and even the centuries.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Wall, Thinking, Ivory

Source: bookriot.com

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Born: October 5, 1958
Occupation: Astrophysicist
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