George Takei Quotes

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 am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.

I’m most comfortable with my computer. Yes, I have an iPhone, but I’ve reached that point now where to read e-mails on my phone, I need my reading glasses. I’m most comfortable with the big-screen computer.

It kills me to hear Donald Trump talking.

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.

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.

There’s no point living at my age with many ingrained great fears.

The Russians are taunting the IOC with the homophobic laws that they pass.

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.

I’m George Takei, and I’m straight… up asking you to vote.

Would-be terrorists cannot so much as board a plane without a thorough screening, yet we give them nearly unfettered access to very dangerous weapons.

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.

Social media affords me an opportunity to interact with fans on a daily basis, not just for a few seconds apiece at a science-fiction convention.

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

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.

They’re the best critics. Workshops are good, and drama teachers are fine, but the best is the audience. And even better if they’re paying!

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.

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.

When billionaires can give $50 million, $500 million to a campaign, and there’s no limit, then it makes a mockery of ‘one man, one vote.’

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.

Those Tea Party people are crazy. I mean, they’re lunatics. They close down the government, throw people out of their jobs – hundreds of thousands of people – and they say that they’re doing it ultimately in the interest of creating jobs.

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.

Dramatic shows are the ones that I am attracted to.

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.

I intend to live life, not just exist.

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.

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

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

I love being an actor.

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.

To characterize all Muslims as terrorists is fear-mongering of the worst kind.

I’m proud of my relationship with ‘Star Trek’! ‘Star Trek’ is a show that I am philosophically compatible with.

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.

I think my whole life has been shaped by my childhood incarceration in America’s concentration camps.

The arc of our history is toward more equality being expanded to more and 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.

Gene Roddenbury felt that television was being wasted. That it had the potential for enlightenment and even inspiration.

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

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

I don’t consider it jumping ship. The ‘Star Trek’ philosophy is to embrace the diversity of the universe, and ‘Star Wars’ is part of that diversity. I also think ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars’ are related beyond both having the word ‘Star.’

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.

Radio dramas have disappeared. What we do have now is books on tape, which I find wonderful. I’ve done some of those. Otherwise, radio acting is now gone.

In Indiana, gays and lesbians can be fired from their jobs with impunity, and in Arkansas, it’s the same thing. We need those protective laws to truly have an equal society.

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

People are interested not just in Sulu, but George Takei – and he’s gay. Life is full of twist and turns.

I discovered that funny animal pictures – memes – would get a lot of likes and shares.

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.

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.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

Up until the time I was cast in ‘Star Trek,’ the roles were pretty shallow – thin, stereotyped, one-dimensional roles. I knew this character was a breakthrough role, certainly for me as an individual actor but also for the image of an Asian character: no accent, a member of the elite leadership team.

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

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.

We can’t let the past be forgotten.

I was pursuing my acting career, but I was silent on the LGBT issue, the issue that was closest to me. I knew if I came out then, I’d have had to change careers.

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

‘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.

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.

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.

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

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

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