Quotes from George Takei

I discovered that funny animal pictures - memes - would get a lot of likes and shares.

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

They say memory is the first thing to go. The second thing to go is memory.

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

Years later, the trauma of those experiences continued to haunt me. Most Japanese Americans from my parents' generation didn't like to talk about the internment with their children. As with many traumatic experiences, they were anguished by their memories and haunted by shame for something that wasn't their fault. Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don't carry it the way the victims do.

It's really hard to hate someone for being different when you're too busy laughing together.

That remains part of the problem—that we don't know the unpleasant aspects of American history...and therefore we don't learn the lesson those chapters have to teach us. So we repeat them over and over again.

We should indeed keep calm in the face of difference, and live our lives in a state of inclusion and wonder at the diversity of humanity.

People can do great things, George. They can come up with noble, shining ideals. But people are also fallible human beings, and we know they made a terrible mistake. - Takekuma Norman Takei

Pioneering is never done in front of cheerleaders urging on a roaring grandstand of popular approval.

Memory is a wily keeper of the past, usually dependable, but at times, deceptive. Childhood memories are especially slippery. Sweet and so full of joy, they can often be a misrendering of the truth. For a child, that sweetness, out of context and intensely subjective, remains forever real. I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.

People forget that stereotypes aren't bad because they are always untrue. Stereotypes are bad because they are not always true. If we allow ourselves to judge another based on a stereotype, we have allowed a gross generalization to replace our own thinking.

As the old saying goes, I was simply looking for fan love, in Alderaan places.

Unfriending me when I didn't even know we were friends? It's like breaking wind when you're home alone. If I can't smell you, knock yourself out.

As with many traumatic experiences, they were anguished by their memories and haunted by shame for something that wasn't their fault. Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don't carry it the way victims do.

Cats, on the other hand, are similar to Vulcans—dispassionate, contemplative and pointy-eared.

There is more story in a minor character like Boba Fett than there is in all the clutter of various vampires in the Twilight franchise.

My father once told me that American democracy is a people's democracy at heart, and that it therefore can be as great as the American people, or as fallible. It depends on all of us. But our system is more fragile than we know. To sustain it, we must always cherish the ideals on which it was founded, remain vigilant against the dark forces that threaten it, and actively engage in the process of making it work.

Our Democracy is a Participatory Democracy. Existentially it's dependent on people who cherish the shinning, highest ideals of our Democracy and actively engage in the political process.

If you don't know who Eleanor Rigby is, you probably were born after 1985 and need to listen to some real music.

The irony of this endeavor is palpable, for English itself is a hopeless hodgepodge of other tongues, with more exceptions than rules, more chaos than order, and enough new words created each day to keep the Oxford English Dictionary folks very, very busy.

Life is too short not to order the bacon dessert.

The wheel of democracy turns slowly.

I appreciate failure. Failure means that an attempt was made, and a lesson can be learned. As long as we're alive after the effort, there is a chance for success the next time around.