Top 40 Gene Roddenberry Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

2. “Time is the fire in which we burn.”

— Gene Roddenberry

Featured in: Time Quotes, Quotes About Reality, Quotes About Fire

3. “It is the struggle itself that is most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does not matter that we will not reach our ultimate goal. The effort itself yields its own reward.”

— Gene Roddenberry

4. “I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We’re still just a child creature, we’re still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We’re growing up, we’re moving into adolescence now. When we grow up – man, we’re going to be something!”

— Gene Roddenberry

Featured in: Quotes About Growing Up

5. “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.”

— Gene Roddenberry

6. “If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.”

— Gene Roddenberry

7. “To be different is not necessarily to be ugly; to have a different idea is not necessarily to be wrong. The worst possible thing is for all of us to begin to look and talk and act and think alike.”

— Gene Roddenberry

8. “The Strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.”

— Gene Roddenberry

9. “If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He has so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a Supreme Being.”

— Gene Roddenberry

10. “Why are we now going into space? Well, why did we trouble to look past the next mountain? Our prime obligation to ourselves is to make the unknown known. We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.”

— Gene Roddenberry

11. “In the 24th century there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all the children will know how to read.”

— Gene Roddenberry

12. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

13. “It isn’t all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.”

— Gene Roddenberry

14. “We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.”

— Gene Roddenberry

15. “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

16. “A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away.”

— Gene Roddenberry

17. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

18. “For Star Trek proves, as faulty as individual episodes could be, is that the much-maligned common man and common woman has an enormous hunger for brotherhood. They are ready for the twenty-third century now, and they are light-years ahead of their petty governments and their visionless leaders.”

— Gene Roddenberry

19. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

20. “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

21. “Ancient astronauts didn’t build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they’re clever and they work hard.”

— Gene Roddenberry

22. “Matter of internal security – the age-old cry of the oppressor. Picard.”

— Gene Roddenberry

23. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

24. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

25. “For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.”

— Gene Roddenberry

26. “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.’”

— Gene Roddenberry

27. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

28. “They say that ninety per cent of TV is junk. But ninety per cent of everything is junk.”

— Gene Roddenberry

29. “We have within reach, now, the attainment of almost every dream of mankind.”

— Gene Roddenberry

30. “Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all.”

— Gene Roddenberry

31. “It has become a crusade of mine to demonstrate that TV need not be violent to be exciting.”

— Gene Roddenberry

32. “They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn’t agree with.”

— Gene Roddenberry

33. “Earth is the nest, the cradle, and we’ll move out of it. Gene Roddenberry.”

— Gene Roddenberry

34. “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!”

— Gene Roddenberry

35. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

36. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

37. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

38. “Time is the fire in which we burn. Gene Roddenberry.”

— Gene Roddenberry

39. “Art is really people asking the eternal question, “What is it all about?””

— Gene Roddenberry

40. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

41. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

42. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

43. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

44. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

45. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

46. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry

47. “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.”

— Gene Roddenberry