Quotes by Gene Roddenberry

“Time is the fire in which we burn”

“A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away.”

“We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes”

“These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five year mission... to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

“These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, its continuing mission to explore a strange new world, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?

For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It wasnt until I was beginning to do Star Trek that the subject of religion arose. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, No, we dont.

When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.-- Vina, The Menagerie (The Cage), Star Trek, 1966

A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away.

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

Technology would have long ago made privacy impossible, except that this had only made it more precious and desirable--and in the close confines of starship life, respect for anothers privacy had become a powerful tradition.

If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of lifes exciting variety, not something to fear.

Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.

No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids - human beings built them, because theyre clever and they work hard.

My model for Kirk was Horatio Hornblower from the C.S. Forester sea stories. Shatner was open-minded about science fiction and a marvelous choice.

The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.

We stress humanity, and this is done at considerable cost. We cant have a lot of dramatics that other shows get away with - promiscuity, greed, jealousy. None of those have a place in Star Trek.

Star Trek was an attempt to say humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in lifeforms.

I wanted to send a message to the television industry that excitement is not made of car chases.