George Takei Quotations

And it seems to me important for a country, for a nation to certainly know about its glorious achievements but also to know where its ideals failed, in order to keep that from happening again.

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.

But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

My memories of camp - I was four years old to eight years old - they're fond memories.

Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.

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.

Every time we had a hot war going on in Asia, it was difficult for Asian Americans here.

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

I'm an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year.

I'm a civic busybody and I've been blessed with an active career.

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.

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

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

I thought this convention phenomenon was very flattering, but that's about the extent of it.

I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!

Plays close, movies wrap and TV series eventually get cancelled, and we were cancelled in three season.

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

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.

Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us.

We are going to make a stronger, better, truer democracy....We will boldly go where America has never gone before.

So I've been a political activist all my life and I think in a large measure it's because of the internment that we experienced 50 years ago.

I didn't want to talk about being in an internment camp, ... They would ask me, where was I? I would say I was far away...But I never went into details.

I'm also serving as a commissioner on the Japan-U.S. Commission, appointed by President Clinton, which will be taking me to Tokyo in June.

You know, it's not really coming out, ... It's more like a long, long walk through what began as a narrow corridor that starts to widen.

We are part of the fabric of America, from U.S. senators to your schoolteacher to your local banker.

We were taken to Arkansas in trains like this.

So the history of Star Trek is one directed, guided and determined by the Star Trek fans, and here they are again, asserting themselves.

And the 442nd (Regimental Combat) Team emerged from the European theater as the single most decorated outfit to return from Europe.

They didn't want 'those people' coming into Hancock Park, low-income people. The Hancock Park people clearly were making their opposition known to Henry Waxman.

That's right. These are the suitcases that immigrants brought with them, ... Star Trek.

They are the real ones. We were the future fiction version and they're the ones that are making whatever we did credible. It's their heroism, their commitment, their discipline and their victory that's going to make the Starship Enterprise that much more credible.

The large popular normality is that rigid, constrained normality, ... But there's another natural normality. And you come to realize, 'This is who I am. And by gum, I'm not going to let it be a constraint!'

I love the show, and I'm proud of my association with the show, and certainly the character is one that is very much a part of me.

I know that STAR TREK fans might come, but I hope with that first speech, I'll be able to persuade them to forget George Takei and see Martin Dysart.

I think we learn more from those times in our history where we stumbled as a democracy than we learn from the glorious chapters.

Well, you know, I do think in the larger span of things, I owe it all to Star Trek, because Star Trek has given me this pop icon status if you will, and one of the gifts have been this megaphone I have which amplifies my voice and I can reach people. And I do think the movement for equality for LGBT Americans is in the same context of all of the great American movements, you know, the basic fundamental ideals of this country of justice and equality.

The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay. The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young.

By seeing a same-sex couple in ordinary situations, that it might make people think twice about if they have, you know, questions about acceptance of LGBT equality, it's one way to just say that, you know, 'We're members of your family and gay people are like anybody else.'

Life is too short not to order the bacon dessert.

Nothing is what it seems on the surface of Heroes.

Facebook itself has an interest in having great content so that its users keep coming back.

Social media is like ancient Egypt: writing things on walls and worshiping cats.

What's needed today, now, more than ever, is 'Star Peace' for there is an ominous, mutual threat to all science fiction. It's called 'Twilight'. And it is really, really bad,

If leadership requires a fired-up sense of purpose and imagination, it also demands a profound connection to the society to be led.

Cat's are unpredictable. It is a fine line between the cure, inquisitive and innocent creature resting on our lap and the hissing, spitting and deranged banshee it might become at any moment. This is why we're trying always to win their love.

The real challenge in acting is in comedy. It's easier to get that gasp in a drama. Not easy, because you still have to find that emotional pitch. And when you do something in drama and you hear that sob from the audience it's so fulfilling. But as a comic actor, when the laugh is supposed to come and you punch in that line and nothing happens it is dreadful. It's horrific and you feel like dying right there.

I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater.

We have the history of slavery or inequality to women, and now the civil rights movement of the 21st century is the struggle for equality for the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. And I think it's important for Americans to know about the times that we failed.

People forget that stereotypes aren’t bad because they are always untrue. Stereotypes are bad because they are not always true. If we allow ourselves to judge another based on a stereotype, we have allowed a gross generalization to replace our own thinking.

Pioneering is never done in front of cheerleaders urging on a roaring grandstand of popular approval.

As the old saying goes, I was simply looking for fan love, in Alderaan places.

A man who layeth with another man must be stoned.

Unfriending me when I didn’t even know we were friends? It’s like breaking wind when you’re home alone. If I can’t smell you, knock yourself out.

Do your duty as an American, and as a citizen of the galaxy... Vote!

Our democracy is a people's democracy, and it can be as great as people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are.

Good grief. If we can’t laugh at ourselves, and at one another, in good spirit and without malice, then what fun can be left? If we must withhold all ribbing in the name of protecting everyone’s feelings, then we truly are a toothless society. We will reach what I call “the lowest common denominator of butthurt.

The starship Enterprise was a metaphor starship Earth, and the vision was that the strength of this starship lay in its diversity.

There is more story in a minor character like Boba Fett than there is in all the clutter of various vampires in the Twilight franchise.

The only thing worse than human ignorance is human pride in that ignorance.

We should indeed keep calm in the face of difference, and live our lives in a state of inclusion and wonder at the diversity of humanity.

You know, when a man is raped you never hear about what he was wearing.

It’s really hard to hate someone for being different when you’re too busy laughing together.

Our differences in beliefs do not truly separate us, or elevate us over others. Rather, they highlight the rich tapestry that is humanity.

If you have to make laws to hurt a group of people just to prove your morals and faith, then you have no true morals or faith to prove.

I myself am a Buddhist, not a Christian. But I cannot help but think that if Christ ran a public establishment, it would be open to all, and He would be the last to refuse service to anyone. It is, simply put, the most un-Christian of notions.

All that was required for it to become law was the autograph of one actor.