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.
We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.
For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.
Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all.
There was much to put out of his mind. Why was it difficult to forget Chekov’s astonished delight which greeted him at the command airlock when he boarded. And on the bridge – Kirk! The mere name made Spock groan inwardly as he remembered what it had cost him to turn away from that welcome. T’hy’la!
Matter of internal security – the age-old cry of the oppressor. Picard.
They say that ninety per cent of TV is junk. But ninety per cent of everything is junk.
I think God is as much a basic ingredient in the universe as neutrons and positrons. This is the prime force, when we look around the universe.
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.