“If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.”

I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.

As they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion… Although just as in hostage negotiations, it’s probably best to keep both sides talking to each other.

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.

The day that you stop looking – because you’re content God did it – I don’t need you in the lab. You’re useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.

As areas of knowledge grow, so too do the perimeters of ignorance.

Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what’s really there.

Somehow it’s O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, ‘I never learned to read,’ they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.

Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun’s green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others. It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.

I don’t want people to say, ‘Something is true because Tyson says it is true.’ That’s not critical thinking.