George Takei Quotes (33 Quotes)

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

I've been enormously lucky in my career ... and certainly the capper on the string of luck was meeting Gene Roddenberry and to be cast in the role of Sulu, which was a breakthrough role for an Asian American actor....I think Sulu played a very important role in balancing the perception of Asians by the North American public.

I didn't want to talk about being in an internment camp, ... They would ask me, where was I I would say I was far away...But I never went into details.

Plays close, movies wrap and TV series eventually get cancelled, and we were cancelled in three season.

Well, the whole history of Star Trek is the market demand.

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

They didn't want 'those people' coming into Hancock Park, low-income people. The Hancock Park people clearly were making their opposition known to Henry Waxman.

That's right. These are the suitcases that immigrants brought with them, ... Star Trek.

And it seems to me important for a country, for a nation to certainly know about its glorious achievements but also to know where its ideals failed, in order to keep that from happening again.

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.

The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay, ... The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young.

As you know, when Star Trek was canceled after the second season, it was the activism of the fans that revived it for a third season.

I'm a civic busybody and I've been blessed with an active career.

You know, it's not really coming out, ... It's more like a long, long walk through what began as a narrow corridor that starts to widen.

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

I'm an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year.

I thought this convention phenomenon was very flattering, but that's about the extent of it.

Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us.

This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.

Every time we had a hot war going on in Asia, it was difficult for Asian Americans here.

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

We are going to make a stronger, better, truer democracy....We will boldly go where America has never gone before.

Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.

They are the real ones. We were the future fiction version and they're the ones that are making whatever we did credible. It's their heroism, their commitment, their discipline and their victory that's going to make the Starship Enterprise that much more credible.

I'm also serving as a commissioner on the Japan-U.S. Commission, appointed by President Clinton, which will be taking me to Tokyo in June.

And the 442nd (Regimental Combat) Team emerged from the European theater as the single most decorated outfit to return from Europe.

I love the show, and I'm proud of my association with the show, and certainly the character is one that is very much a part of me.

So I've been a political activist all my life and I think in a large measure it's because of the internment that we experienced 50 years ago.

So the history of Star Trek is one directed, guided and determined by the Star Trek fans, and here they are again, asserting themselves.

But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!

Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.