Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.”
“Or maybe arguing with people you disagree with takes less effort than exploring why they think differently from you.”
“Do whatever it takes to avoid fooling yourself into believing that something is true when it is false, or that something is false when it is true. This approach to knowing enjoys taproots in the eleventh century, as expressed by the Arabic scholar Ibn al-Haytham (AD 965–1040), also known as Alhazen. In particular, he cautioned the scientist against bias: “He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.”2 Centuries later, during the European Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci would be in full agreement: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinion.”
“To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.”
“Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled. After all that, you’d think only one definition for truth should exist in this world, but no.”
“Instead of the White House, why not take our visiting space alien to ComicCon. We’d have legitimate concerns that nobody would notice an actual alien camouflaged among those pretending to be one. The upside? Our alien visitor phones home and instead reports—“They’re just like us!”
“I came to resent labels of all kinds. What are they, if not intellectually lazy ways of asserting you know everything about a person you've never met?”
“Differences in opinion enrich the diversity of a nation, and ought to be cherished and respected in any free society, provided everyone remains free to disagree with one another and, most importantly, everyone remains open to rational arguments that could change your mind.”
“All this leaves me wondering what it means to be aligned with a political party at all. Do they do your thinking for you? Do they define your attitudes toward issues that confront the country? If so, then you are a pawn of those in power. But in a representative republic, those in power should be a pawn of you.”
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.” —Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut”
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Book Keywords:
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