Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

I study the universe. It's the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time.

If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.

As an American, I grew up in an era where we led the world in everything. Everything!

Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.

My parents didn't know much science; in fact, they didn't know science at all. But they could recognize a science book when they saw it, and they spent a lot of time at bookstores, combing the remainder tables for science books to buy for me. I had one of the biggest libraries of any kid in school, built on books that cost 50 cents or a dollar.

For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn't just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.

As history has shown, pure science research ultimately ends up applying to something. We just don't know it at the time.

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.

Let's find a new way to think about the entire taxonomy of solar system objects, and not clutch to this concept of 'planet,' which, of course, only ever meant, 'Do you move against the background stars, regardless of what you're made of?'

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it.