Nye Quotes

Anyone who says, "Here's my address,
write me a poem," deserves something in reply.
So I'll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Maybe the hardest thing about moving over seas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together in little pieces. ~ Naomi Shibab Nye

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That's just crazy. ~ Bill Nye

When you can get others to admire your ideals and to want what you want, you do not have to spend as much on sticks and carrots to move them in your direction. Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive. ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

The final entity was the beast. The steel juggernaut that raked claws made of screams along the bones of their soul.All of the pain that Jango had endured as a child had never left his mind. That pain had created a sort of primordial ooze in his fractured mind that sloshed and bled until the beast was birthed from the suffering. The beast lived in a cage forged of willpower deep in the recesses of the mad matrix of his splintered mind. It rattled the cage and roared for release, but he was loath to ever set the beast loose ... again. ~ Cedric Nye

Space has no top, no bottom; in fact, it is bottomless both at the bottom and the top. ~ Edgar Wilson Nye

More than five hundred people have flown in space and twelve people have walked on the moon, but only three humans in history have been to the bottom of the ocean. ~ Bill Nye

Our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together - Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University. ~ Jon Ronson

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

He had never returned to his family. He'd been a blank slate, and one destined to walk the world until the end of days. Where in such a life was there room for affection? ~ Dekka Nye

Poetry, the most intimate form of expression, gives us a deeper sense of reality than headlines and news stories ever could. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

I never did understand
why the tree was still happy
at the end. The little boy
used her until she was
nothing but a stump.
She couldn't even run away.
But the ending was always the same:
And the tree was happy. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Every politician just has to remember how he got his position in the first place. A young candidate running for Congress or any outsider interested in public office could only achieve his goals by relying on soft power. They could not force anyone to vote for them. They needed to convince their potential voters, they needed to do fundraising, they needed to be attractive candidates. ~ Joseph Nye

Only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

I'm a man born to blood and pain, and peace would be a killing blow for me. ~ Cedric Nye

How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society? ~ Bill Nye

Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Leadership experts and the public alike extol the virtues of transformational leaders - those who set out bold objectives and take risks to change the world. We tend to downplay 'transactional' leaders, whose goals are more modest, as mere managers. ~ Joseph Nye

Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it. ~ Bill Nye

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

We are just a speck, on a speck, orbiting a speck, in the corner of a speck, in the middle of nowhere. ~ Bill Nye

Many people have traveled all their lives and yet do not know how to behave themselves when on the road ... Ladies and gentlemen should guard against traveling by rail while in a beastly state of intoxication ... the morning is a good time to find out how many people have succeeded in getting on the passenger train, who ought to be in the stock car. ~ Edgar Wilson Nye

He saw that his end was near, and he smiled. ~ Cedric Nye

It is my mission to change the world. I'm not kidding: Make no small plans, dream mighty things. I feel if we get enough people engaged in climate change, we will get enough people to change the world. We will revolutionize the way we produce electricity and provide clean water to people. ~ Bill Nye

Skin color is basically a measure of the local ultraviolet levels, and it is controlled by relatively minor adaptive changes in the genome. ~ Bill Nye

One organism's trash is another organism's treasure, as I like to say. ~ Bill Nye

From an evolutionary standpoint you can't just wipe everything out and start over, and I don't think you can do it in the school system either. ~ Bill Nye

I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble. ~ Bill Nye

I hope climate science becomes the big thing. And then what I want is electrical engineers to solve the world's energy problems, energy distribution problems. I want mechanical engineers to make better transportation systems. I want chemical engineers to develop better solar panels, and so on. ~ Bill Nye

I want you to carry this question home with you: gain such a victory, and what do you do with it? ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

A two-and-a-half-year-old is pretty experienced at making a mess, anyway. ~ Bill Nye

What did exclusivity ever have to offer but a distorted, unrealistic view of the world? People who stuck only to their own kind were scared people. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Altruism is not a moral or religious ideal, no matter what some people might tell you, it is an essential biological part of who or what we are as a species. ~ Bill Nye

Amal, you look stunned," said Mrs. Melchor. "Have you been struck by lightning between classes?"
"Yes," she said. "The lightning of ignorance."
Mrs. Melchor raised her eyebrows. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It's not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs. ~ Bill Nye

The triumph of an uncluttered mind. ~ Blaine Nye

America had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others. ~ Bill Nye

As I learned more about evolution, I realized that from nature's point of view, you and I ain't such a big deal. Humans are just another species on this planet trying to make a go of it, trying to pass our genes into the future, just like chrysanthemums, muskrats, sea jellies, poison ivy ... and bumblebees. ~ Bill Nye

Fantastic," I said without an ounce of enthusiasm. "I'm just one more embarrassing confession away from taking over the world."
Spencer Nye ~ Jason Letts

To be successful as a living thing, you have to have offspring, who have offspring, who have offspring. Rest assured, your family did, or you wouldn't be here. As troubling as it may seem, your parents had sex - at least once. If you have brothers and sisters, more than once ... One shudders to think of it. ~ Bill Nye

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, "Please leave your foolishness at home." But how could I do that? It was stuck on me. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Let me peer out at the world through your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder, or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.) Let me see how your blue is my turquoise and my orange is your gold. Suddenly binary stars, we have startling gravity. Let's compare scintillation - let's share starlight. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

You're dressed in a tuxedo, you wear a bow tie. A bow tie with a tuxedo is more formal than a straight tie with a tuxedo. ~ Bill Nye

The short answer to our question is that we are not entering a post-American world. It is not possible for this (or any) book to see "the future," because there are so many possible futures dependent on unpredictable events and they play a larger role the further out one tries to look. Thus it is important to specify a time horizon. For example, if the "American century" began in 1941, will the United States still have primacy in power resources and play the central role in the global balance of power among states in 2041? My guess is "yes." In that sense, the American century is not over, but because of transnational and non-state forces, it is definitely changing in important ways that are described below. But first, we must look at the charge that the United States is in decline. ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

I've got no problem with anybody's religion. But if you go claiming the Earth is only 10,000 years old, that's just wrong. ~ Bill Nye

What makes the United States great, the reason people wanted to live in the United States, move here still, is because of our ability to innovate. ~ Bill Nye

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge. ~ Bill Nye

In these evenings he sat by our beds weaving folktales like vivid little scarves. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion. ~ Bill Nye

Nothing good is free, and nothing free is good. You want the world to change, you have to force that change behind gun smoke and lead. Blood is the price, always and ever, if you want to buy freedom. ~ Cedric Nye

At lunch, Michael began to reminisce about his first election in Wales, when he was selected to occupy Nye Bevan's seat. A brief kerfuffle had resulted when his name did not appear on the short list of Labour Party candidates for the seat. Evidently some locals preferred not to take on Michael in spite of his association with Nye. Jennie Lee, along with others, intervened and Michael not only made the list but also was selected and won his seat in the general election. He had a wonderful photograph of himself and Jill, with their dog Vanessa between them. The happy looking dog in the centre looked as if she had won the election, I told Michael. "It did, too," he said. ~ Carl Rollyson

We all find ourselves involved in projects or activities that confound us-when or why did I say I would do this? What was I thinking? I needed a poem for myself that said-pause longer. Think again. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will make
something of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing?
maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a couple
resolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

America rests on shared values rather than shared ethnicity. ~ Joseph Nye

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

What happens to other species also happens to us. ~ Bill Nye

The world is neither unipolar, multipolar, nor chaotic - it is all three at the same time. ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

You Have to Be Very Careful"

You have to be careful telling things.
Some ears are tunnels.
Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.
Some ears are flat pans like the miners used
looking for gold.
What you say will be washed out with the stones.

You look for a long time till you find the right ears.
Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,
a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,
and the slow, gradually growing possibility
that when you find such ears
they already know. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Mother seemed happy because the school yard where Rafik would spend his recesses was surrounded by a high stone wall. She'd recently started talking about 'safety' in a way that made Liyana jumpy. Liyana never thought about safety unless someone else brought it up. She didn't WANT to think about it either. SHE WANTED TO LIVE IN AN UNLOCKED WORLD ~ Naomi Shibab Nye

Red Brocade"

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he's come from,
where he's headed.
That way, he'll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you'll be
such good friends
you don't care.

Let's go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That's the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Making a Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

In another couple centuries I'm sure that worldview won't even exist. There's no evidence for it. ~ Bill Nye

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why? It's not that you don't love them any more.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

She said I'd have to die," Valkyrie answered.
"Which you have already done," Nye nodded ... "The truly tragic thing about all of this," it said, "is that you won't feel any of the great pain I'm about to put you through. ~ Derek Landy

How could she, a girl who could love someone so unconditionally, be just as capable of killing in cold blood? ~ Dekka Nye

It's survival of the hang-in-there's, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs. ~ Bill Nye

As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often, 'When you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science. It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I've never seen before. It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are - you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself. ~ Bill Nye

Are people the only holy land? ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

The word purebred is something we can define by counting generations back in dog-sex land. But it is not an indication of species or anything special, really. ~ Bill Nye

Tax dollars intended for science education must not be used to teach creationism as any sort of real explanation of nature, because any observation or process of inference about our origin and the nature of the universe disproves creationism in every respect. ~ Bill Nye

I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem. Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It's not that we need more food. It's that we need to manage our food system better. ~ Bill Nye

A more serious concern would be if the United States turned inward and seriously curtailed immigration. With its current levels of immigration, America is one of the few developed countries that may avoid demographic decline and keep its share of world population, but this might change if reactions to terrorist events or public xenophobia closed the borders. Fears over the effect of immigration on national values and on a coherent sense of American identity have existed since the early years of the nation. ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Democracy is the best school to learn soft power. ~ Joseph Nye

If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself? ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Stairs. Gray halls. Nye sniffed the odors, separating one from another: lavatory disinfectant, alcohol, dead cigars. Beyond ~ Truman Capote

It ain't how hard you are when you're standing over top of someone that really matters. It's how hard you are when someone's standing over top of you that shows what you're made of. ~ Cedric Nye

Ah ... Dectective, this is a very private and personal moment for them both. I'm sure you can understand their need for-"
A man stumbled out clutching a sheet round his waist and Valkyrie's eyes widened. "Whoa," she said as he hummed into a table. He was tall and sandy-haired and his physique was jaw-dropping lay amazing. "No way," she said. "Scapegrace?"
The man looked at her, and shook his head. The a woman came charging out of the back room, slammed into the man and they both went rolling across the floor.
"Give it to me!" The woman screamed. "Give it to me!"
Nye scuttled over. "Mr Scapegrace, you know the procedure cannot be repeated, your brains are in far too deteriorated a condition."
"You! Gave! Me! The! Wrong! Body! ~ Derek Landy

I Still Have Everything You Gave Me
It is dusty on the edges.
It is slightly rotten.
I guard it without thinking.
I focus on it once a year
when I shake it out in the wind.
I do not ache.
I would not trade. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

An average horse can produce only about half a horsepower for any extended period. ~ David E. Nye

There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as "we"; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm. ~ Bill Nye

Smart power is neither hard nor soft. It is both. Joseph ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

The information you get from social media is not a substitute for academic discipline at all. ~ Bill Nye

I just want to remind us all there are billions of people in the world who are deeply religious, who get enriched by the wonderful sense of community by their religion. But these same people do not embrace the extraordinary view that the Earth is somehow only 6,000 years old. ~ Bill Nye

The people who dismiss concerns about global warming seem to be the pessimists who would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to the planet are the optimists who believe we also have the intelligence - we, as a species, working together - to come up with powerful solutions to the problems we're working on that will change the world for the better. Which way of looking at the world is going to produce a Next Greatest Generation? Will it be the ones who give up, or the ones who get going? Making ~ Bill Nye

When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Omer took a deep breath and stood up. 'It's a bad history without a doubt, he said. Nothing to be proud of.' He closed his eyes, turning his face to the side, right into the sun. 'So what are we going to do about it?' Then he opened his eyes, made a little bow, and put his hand out toward the avenue, as if to offer her the street. ~ Naomi Shibab Nye

A moral vision must be balanced by the realist dimension of prudence to have a reasonable prospect of success. ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

That's what makes the creationist viewpoint not just staggeringly wrong, but sadly impoverished. In twisting around the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they take a powerful tool for understanding the world and try to make it into a barrier to understanding instead. ~ Bill Nye

I don't perceive an anti-religious agenda, especially with regard to Christians and Christianity. The issue being debated was creationism, the idea that the Earth is 6,000 years old. As I understand it, this involves the Bible's Old Testament exclusively. ~ Bill Nye

We would get to study you, frankly, said a tall, lean man who, I kid you not, looked just like Bill Nye the Science Guy. ~ James Patterson

I worked at comedy clubs - if I can use the term 'work' - for several years. I middled at one point. I never made it; I was never a headliner. I never made enough time to write enough good material, in my opinion. ~ Bill Nye

The carbon fee would raise the cost of the things you buy (since right now there is some carbon emitted in the production and distribution of pretty much everything). That's a little less money in your pocket. But at the end of the year, the government would take all of the money collected by the carbon fee, divide it up, and give it back to you as a dividend check. By you, of course, I mean all of you. The government wouldn't keep any of the money. All the fee would do is put a realistic price on the carbon we dump into the environment. Every factory, every company would have an incentive to reduce emissions, because then they could sell things at a lower price. Consumers, given a choice between a low-carbon pair of jeans and a high-carbon pair of jeans, would see a cost advantage in choosing the former. If you live a low-carbon lifestyle all year, when your dividend check arrives you will find that you came out ahead. ~ Bill Nye

Every day is a poetry day. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye