Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.
Interpretation
Ignorance spreads like a virus, and it is only through reasoning that we can combat it.
In this quote, Neil Degrasse Tyson emphasizes the dangers of ignorance and equates it to a virus that can infect society. He urges that the only way to counteract this spread is through reason and knowledge, implying that it is a collective responsibility to promote understanding and critical thinking for the betterment of humanity.
In practice
This quote can be used in educational speeches to motivate students to pursue knowledge.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
True understanding is possible only when we are fully conscious of our thought, not as an operative observer on this thought, but completely and without the intervention of a choice.
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
We are the Bibles the world is reading; We are the creeds the world is needing; We are the sermons the world is heeding.
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.
The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
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