Top 163 Quotes & Sayings by George Takei

We are living in a science fiction world.

Our democracy is dependent on people who passionately cherish the ideals of a democracy. Every man is created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's a wonderful idea, and it takes people who cherish that idea to be actively involved in the process.

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

As my audience grew more diverse, I started interjecting social justice advocacy and commentaries about LGBT equality, and it just kept growing more.

They didn't incarcerate the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. That's the place that was bombed. But the Japanese-American population was about 45 percent of the island of Hawaii. And if they extracted those Japanese-Americans, the economy would have collapsed. But on the mainland, we were thinly spread out up and down the West Coast.

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.

The best way to get people to connect with an issue is to humanize it. You can do so much more powerfully with music and touch the heart.

It has long been a dream of mine that this important story one day would be told on the great American stage of Broadway. In fact, I've dedicated much of the latter half of my life to ensuring the story of the internment is known.

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

My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I've been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans.

I do think that Japan will be one of the nations that have equality, and that, too, will serve as an example for other Asian nations.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the same-sex marriage bill, my blood was boiling. I had been silent, but that night, Brad and I watched the news and saw all these young people pouring out on Santa Monica Boulevard venting their rage, and I said, 'I have to speak out.'

I have a sister who is technophobic; she doesn't even use a computer.

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.

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

The central pillar of our justice system is due process. You have got to be charged with a crime. Then you can challenge those charges in a court of law with a trial.

I've been an activist since my late teens. I take this very seriously and try to use the gift that's been given to me - access to the media - as positively as I can.

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.

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

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.

I may not have trekked through the galaxies in reality. But I have trekked all over this planet: Australia, Asia, Latin America, Europe.

On a bus, your eyes, ears, and pores are open absorbing in the variety, the wonder, and the magic of the city. It's a wonderful way to get to know the city.

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.

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.

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.

My grandmother lived to 104 years old, and part of her success was she woke up every morning to a brand new day. She said every morning is a new gift. Her favorite hobby was collecting birthdays.

It kills me to hear Donald Trump talking.

When Brad and I got married in 2008, it got a lot of attention. And all the attention was over the fact that we were two men, but people were hardly conscious of the fact that we were entering into an interracial marriage. That's wonderful, because it was only 50 years ago with Loving v. Virginia that interracial marriages were made legal.

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.

I was blessed with my career. I passionately love acting. And it's given me a good livelihood.

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.

'Star Trek' fans totally accepted my sexual orientation. There are a great number of LGBT people across 'Star Trek' fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different - the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian.

At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.

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

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.

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.

I'm a chairman on the Board of Governors for the East-West Players, the longest-running Asian-American theater company in America.

I'm optimistic, and I have a lot of goals. And I obey the laws of nature: I eat, exercise, and rest properly. But mostly it's about keeping the mind engaged. My grandmother lived to 104, and she had all of her faculties. I'm physically active and devout - just not as Buddhistic as she was.

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.

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.'

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

I love people. When you're engaged with society and trying to make it a better society, you're an optimist.

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

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.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.

What is important is the reliability of my posts being there to greet my fans with a smile or a giggle every morning. That's how we keep on growing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.

I think being optimistic is ensuring your success. If you start out saying 'I've got this problem,' or 'I'm angry at that,' you will not succeed.

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. And I've been able to wed the two passions.

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

I intend to live life, not just exist.

People want to start their day off with a smile or, better yet, a guffaw.

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.

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

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