Quotes from Gene Roddenberry

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.

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

Time is the fire in which we burn. Gene Roddenberry

Vejur was everything that Spock had ever dreamed of becoming. And yet Vejur was barren! It would never feel pain. Or joy. Or challenge. It was so completely and magnificently logical that its accumulation of knowledge was totally useless.

Earth is the nest, the cradle, and we'll move out of it. Gene Roddenberry

The human race is a remarkable creature, one with great potential, and I hope that 'Star Trek' has helped to show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities. Gene Roddenberry

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.

t is important to the typical 'Star Trek' fan that there is a tomorrow. They pretty much share the 'Star Trek' philosophies about life: the fact that it is wrong to interfere in the evolvement of other peoples, that to be different is not necessarily to be wrong or ugly. Gene Roddenberry

Star Trek' says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived. 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.

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.

The ship's transporters - which let the crew 'beam' from place to place - really came out of a production need. I realized with this huge spaceship, I would blow the whole budget of the show just in landing the thing on a planet.

Because something or someone looks or acts differently from us does not necessarily mean that it is ugly or bad.

The Russians were responsible for the Chekov character. They put in 'Pravda' that, 'Ah, the ugly Americans are at it again. They do a space show, and they forget to include the people who were in space first.' And I said, 'My God, they're right.'

When they put out the sales brochure when we eventually went to series, they carefully rounded Spock's ears and made him look human so he wouldn't scare off potential advertisers.

To cast Mr. Spock, I made a phone call to Leonard, and he came in. That was it.

Earth is the nest, the cradle, and we'll move out of it.

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.

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.

Art is really people asking the eternal question, "What is it all about?"

It isn't all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.

We tried to limit human versus human conflict only to those cases where it could be powerfully motivated and made completely believable.

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