Top 50 George Takei Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— George Takei

2. “If you have to make laws to hurt a group of people just to prove your morals and faith, then you have no true morals or faith to prove.”

— George Takei

3. “The only thing worse than human ignorance is human pride in that ignorance.”

— George Takei

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

— George Takei

5. “Social media is like ancient Egypt: writing things on walls and worshiping cats.”

— George Takei

6. “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.”

— George Takei

7. “The starship Enterprise was a metaphor starship Earth, and the vision was that the strength of this starship lay in its diversity.”

— George Takei

8. “The wheel of democracy turns slowly.”

— George Takei

9. “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.”

— George Takei

10. “Nothing is what it seems on the surface of Heroes.”

— George Takei

11. “Our democracy is a people’s democracy, and it can be as great as people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are.”

— George Takei

12. “If we must withhold all ribbing in the name of protecting everyone’s feelings, then we truly are a toothless society. We will reach what I call “the lowest common denominator of butthurt.”

— George Takei

13. “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.”

— George Takei

14. “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.”

— George Takei

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

— George Takei

16. “Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don’t carry it the way the victims do.”

— George Takei

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

— George Takei

18. “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.”

— George Takei

19. “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.”

— George Takei

20. “Each of us bears a responsibility to reject hate, whatever its form, whatever its justification.”

— George Takei

21. “It’s really hard to hate someone for being different when you’re too busy laughing together.”

— George Takei

22. “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.”

— George Takei

23. “A man who layeth with another man must be stoned.”

— George Takei

24. “I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater.”

— George Takei

25. “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.”

— George Takei

26. “I’m an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year.”

— George Takei

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

— George Takei

28. “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.”

— George Takei

29. “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.”

— George Takei

30. “Life is too short not to order the bacon dessert.”

— George Takei

31. “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.”

— George Takei

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

— George Takei

33. “I think we learn more from those times in our history where we stumbled as a democracy than we learn from the glorious chapters.”

— George Takei

34. “If leadership requires a fired-up sense of purpose and imagination, it also demands a profound connection to the society to be led.”

— George Takei

35. “Cat’s are unpredictable. It is a fine line between the cure, inquisitive and innocent creature resting on our lap and the hissing, spitting and deranged banshee it might become at any moment. This is why we’re trying always to win their love.”

— George Takei

36. “The media is starting to understand that people will “buy” what they want to hear. That explains the growing popularity of MSNBC among liberals and FOX News among conservatives. They are the “Infonewtials” of the modern era.”

— George Takei

37. “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.”

— George Takei

38. “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.”

— George Takei

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

— George Takei

40. “Facebook itself has an interest in having great content so that its users keep coming back.”

— George Takei

41. “I’ve run the marathon several times, so I definitely don’t look like the Great Ancestor!”

— George Takei

42. “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.”

— George Takei

43. “I myself am a Buddhist, not a Christian. But I cannot help but think that if Christ ran a public establishment, it would be open to all, and He would be the last to refuse service to anyone. It is, simply put, the most un-Christian of notions.”

— George Takei

44. “Cats, on the other hand, are similar to Vulcans – dispassionate, contemplative and pointy-eared.”

— George Takei

45. “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.”

— George Takei

46. “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.”

— George Takei

47. “Unfortunately, “winning” generally took a bit of a beating when a certain douchebag began using it as his favorite hashtag on Twitter after being fired from his hit television show.”

— George Takei

48. “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.”

— George Takei

49. “In the networked world, there are fewer Eleanor Rigbys to sing about, for.”

— George Takei

50. “I’m a civic busybody and I’ve been blessed with an active career.”

— George Takei