Rod Serling Quotes

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, ideas, predjudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, predjudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. A thoughtless, freightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all it`s own for the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, is that these things can not be confined to the Twighlight Zone.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
Rod Serling

Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.
Rod Serling

Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.

Rod Serling

There are weapons that are simply thoughts. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.

Rod Serling

It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.

Rod Serling

"We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think."

— Rod Serling

"Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete"

— Rod Serling

"...the worst aspect of our time is prejudice... In almost everything I've written, there is a thread of this - man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself."

— Rod Serling

"for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized"

— Rod Serling

If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.

* Speech at Binghamton Community High School (1968)

I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot — we inhale from our Bartlett's.

* Speech at Moorpark College, Moorpark, California (3 December 1968)

* I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.
o Speech at Moorpark College, Moorpark, California (3 December 1968)

"Hollywood's a great place to live... if you're a grapefruit."

* From a letter to his wife, as quoted in Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval (October 1997), American Masters (PBS: Thirteen/WNET)

"If you need drugs to be a good writer, you're not a good writer."

* The Rod Serling bio page on the Internet Movie DataBase