George Takei Quotes

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

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

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

I went to school in a black tar-paper barrack (as a child in internment camps) and began the day seeing the barbed-wire fence, and thank god those barbed-wire fences are now long gone for Japanese Americans. But I still see an invisible, legalistic barbed-wire that keeps me, my partner of 19 years, Brad Altman, and another group of Americans separated from a normal life. That`s what I`ve been advocating on the Human Rights Campaign Equality Tour--I call it the Equality Trek." (during a 2006 interview with Scott Simon on National Public Radio)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

(Talking about William Shatner): "He`s just a wonderful actor who created a singular character. No one could have done Kirk the way Bill did. His energy and his determination, that`s Bill. And that`s also Captain Kirk."

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.

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

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!

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

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, 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.

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

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. (2005)

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.

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.

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

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

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