For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
I’m in a period of growth and expansion. I’m taking long, hard looks at the world and what’s happening in it, analyzing and thinking. I’m trying to become acquainted with the universe – with the part of it I occupy – and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it is.
I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, ‘thou shalt not,’ or ‘thou shalt.’ I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that.
We stress humanity, and this is done at considerable cost. We can’t have a lot of dramatics that other shows get away with – promiscuity, greed, jealousy. None of those have a place in ‘Star Trek.’
It has become a crusade of mine to demonstrate that TV need not be violent to be exciting.
If ‘Trek’ is a hit, we’d love to do a series of films – a regular event. Look at James Bond’s films. They’ve been around since the early sixties.
In a better world, I can do anything. I’ll be there in a better world. In a better world, they will not laugh at me or look down their nose at me.
When you get into an airplane by yourself and take off, you find yourself in this lovely, three-dimensional world where you can go in any direction. There is no feeling any more exciting than that.
Ancient astronauts didn’t build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they’re clever and they work hard.
We have within reach, now, the attainment of almost every dream of mankind.
I wish I had more control, more like Edgar Rice Burroughs had, but I’m a realist, too. I work in television. I don’t know that I would want to spend the rest of my life controlling my characters.
The present blitz about drugs – I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago – throw them in the cage – as if that’s the whole answer. And it’s not the whole answer.
I became a reader – thank God I became a reader. I lived in a dream world because it was a hell of a lot better world.
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 another’s privacy had become a powerful tradition.
Time is the fire in which we burn. Gene Roddenberry.
Earth is the nest, the cradle, and we’ll move out of it. Gene Roddenberry.
I don’t know if this has a moral or not. Maybe it’s “Don’t sit inside of soap cartons too long – unless you enjoy traveling.
Listening to you gives me the impression that you divide everything into two parts – things you believe, and things you don’t believe. I look at the world differently – there are a few things I firmly believe, and a few things I don’t believe at all, but in between there is a vast range of things I wonder about, and that’s what makes life interesting.
Diversity contains as many treasures as those waiting for us on other worlds. We will find it impossible to fear diversity and to enter the future at the same time.
In a very real sense, we are all aliens on a strange planet. We spend most of our lives reaching out and trying to communicate. If during our whole lifetime, we could reach out and really communicate with just two people, we are indeed very fortunate.