George Takei

Actor

1937-04-20

Quotes by George Takei

• I'm particularly impressed by the creation of the character of Spock, which really was Leonard Nimoy's singular creation. He used everything he had.

  Read quote

• As you know, when Star Trek was canceled after the second season, it was the activism of the fans that revived it for a third season.

  Read quote

• Well, the whole history of Star Trek is the market demand.

  Read quote

• STAR TREK is a show that had a vision about a future that was positive.

  Read quote

• When I was a very young actor, I cruised around in a pretty cool vehicle called the Starship Enterprise.

  Read quote

• 'Star Trek' is about acceptance, and the strength of the Starship Enterprise is that it embraces diversity in all its forms.

  Read quote

• You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.

  Read quote

• In the United States, we have a large, broad middle that are decent, fair-minded people who are too busy to really think about issues other than their next paycheck. Those are the people that we want to get to in order to change the social climate. And Howard Stern has that audience. So I said, 'Let's boldly go where I've never been before.'

  Read quote

• When I heard Donald Trump make that sweeping hysterical statement that all Muslims have to be banned because they are terrorists, I was chilled by that.

  Read quote

• I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.

  Read quote

• We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.

  Read quote

• It will be written on my tombstone in very large letters, 'Here lies Hikaru Sulu,' and in very tiny letters, 'aka George Takei.' I don't protest the inevitable.

  Read quote

• I think Donald Trump's interpretation of marriage is something that he himself doesn't really believe in. 'Traditional marriage' is where two people love each other, commit to each other, care for each other over the years. It is a meaningful ceremony, and his interpretation of that is not recognizing what real marriage is.

  Read quote

• Gene Roddenberry continually reminded us that the Star Trek Enterprise was a metaphor for starship Earth. And the strength in this starship came from its diversity, coming together and working in concert as a team. That is the strength of our countries, Canada and the United States. We are nations of diversity.

  Read quote

• I was doing a civil rights musical here in Los Angeles, and we sang at one of the rallies where Dr. Martin Luther King spoke, and I remember the thrill I felt when we were introduced to him. To have him shake your hand was an absolutely unforgettable experience.

  Read quote

• It was an egregious violation of the American Constitution. We were innocent American citizens, and we were imprisoned simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It shows us just how fragile our Constitution is.

  Read quote

• When I was a teenager, the biggest heartthrob was Tab Hunter. He was in every movie out of Warner Bros. until he was exposed as gay, and his career faded. That was an object lesson. I knew I must protect my sexual orientation.

  Read quote

• This political climate today reminds me of what my father must have gone through in 1942, when the winds of war and fires of hate were surrounding him. We have a candidate for the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump, using the same rhetoric that my father must have heard from elected officials.

  Read quote

• Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.

  Read quote

• I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.

  Read quote