“So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’”

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.

Facts are true whether or not you believe them.

Why can’t we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?

The molecules that comprise our body are traceable to the crucibles of the centers of stars.These atoms and molecules are in us because, in fact, the universe is in us. And, we are not only figuratively, but literally, stardust.

What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind through the universe? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

What I’m saying is, when different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.

Education does not mean the imparting of verbal knowledge alone.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Politics without principles, Education without character, Science without humanity, and Commerce without morality are not only useless, but also positively dangerous.

Our education system must promote nationalism but should be modern and relevant to contemporary needs.

Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.

The education explosion is producing a vast number of people who want to live significant, important lives but lack the ability to satisfy this craving for importance by individual achievement. The country is being swamped with nobodies who want to be somebodies.

A lot of people like to fool you and say that you’re not smart if you never went to college, but common sense rules over everything. That’s what I learned from selling crack.

In our education system, we are taught to munch figures and remember them for lifetime. But does it help? We are not taught how to make decisions.