Top 50 Patrick Stewart Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done!”

— Patrick Stewart

2. “Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.”

— Patrick Stewart

3. “I wouldn’t know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me.”

— Patrick Stewart

4. “I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.”

— Patrick Stewart

5. “Violence is never ever a choice that a man should make.”

— Patrick Stewart

6. “Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain’s ready room died it was always a sad moment.”

— Patrick Stewart

7. “Violence against women is learned. Each of us must examine – and change – the way in which our own behavior might contribute to, enable, ignore or excuse all such forms of violence. I promise to do so, and to invite other me and allies to do the same.”

— Patrick Stewart

8. “I saw Waiting for Godot when I was 17 in rep with a then unknown actor called Peter O’Toole playing Vladimir. I remember leaving the theatre promising myself that one day I would have a go at this play and then pretty much forgot it for 50 years.”

— Patrick Stewart

9. “If someone says ‘Give me one word of advice,’ I say ‘be fearless.’ And knowing without any shadow of a doubt that what they have to give – who they are – is totally unique and not shared by anybody else. And to believe in that uniqueness. It took me decades before I developed courage as an actor.”

— Patrick Stewart

10. “So far as education is concerned, it has had a significant impact on a lot of young people who turn to science as a much more exciting and interesting study than they otherwise might have found, entirely as a result of becoming involved with Star Trek.”

— Patrick Stewart

11. “As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering.”

— Patrick Stewart

Featured in: Romance Quotes

12. “We’ve heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.”

— Patrick Stewart

13. “What identifies an individual as a king is how other people behave towards him. All authority is assumed, and if other people don’t accept your authority then you don’t have it. Perhaps the critical thing to being a convincing figure of authority is actually not to try too hard.”

— Patrick Stewart

14. “At 12 years old in the dangerous world that I was in, with a very difficult home life, I found the stage was the safest place to be. It was predetermined and predictable – and furthermore you got to be someone else. All the problems only began when you left the building.”

— Patrick Stewart

15. “I’ve often reflected on this in the past weeks as I’ve been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.”

— Patrick Stewart

16. “I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.”

— Patrick Stewart

17. “I certainly wanted to maintain some sense of mystery about Picard and that’s why we never allowed certain situations to fully evolve, like the relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher.”

— Patrick Stewart

18. “Comedy today is not what it was years ago. It’s always changing, in particular to female comics. No longer are certain subjects considered to be a male preserve. Women can talk about sexuality and their bodily functions and it can be very, very entertaining. It’s changed the impact of comedy acting.”

— Patrick Stewart

19. “For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.”

— Patrick Stewart

20. “There are four lights.”

— Patrick Stewart

21. “I wasn’t campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you’ve got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time.”

— Patrick Stewart

22. “I am told that there have been over the years a number of experiments taking place in places like Massachusetts Institute of Technology that have been entirely based on concepts raised by Star Trek.”

— Patrick Stewart

23. “I do what I do in my mother’s name because I couldn’t help her then. Now I can.”

— Patrick Stewart

24. “As the captain, I was going to be having the dominant role in most of the episodes, and that was appealing. I wasn’t interested in coming to Hollywood to sit around.”

— Patrick Stewart

25. “There’s no such thing as “just a domestic”.”

— Patrick Stewart

26. “It still frightens me a little bit to think that so much of my life was totally devoted to Star Trek and almost nothing else.”

— Patrick Stewart

27. “I began directing episodes, which was a great light every couple of months. We never short-changed our audience, but it became something that you had to work at rather than something that was a pleasure.”

— Patrick Stewart

28. “I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.”

— Patrick Stewart

29. “The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.”

— Patrick Stewart

30. “One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise.”

— Patrick Stewart

31. “The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they’re renegotiating contracts.”

— Patrick Stewart

32. “I like things that are funny – in everyday conversation, in incidents that you see, in watching TV or watching film. Comedy has always had an impact on my life.”

— Patrick Stewart

33. “I made a promise to myself that I would try to introduce something unexpected in every single episode of the series. It was largely to amuse myself as much as anything. I didn’t ever want the audience to feel that they knew everything.”

— Patrick Stewart

34. “During my time we had two chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at different times of course, on the bridge, both of whom asked my permission to sit on the captain’s chair.”

— Patrick Stewart

35. “William Shatner has one style. We have completely contrasting personalities. We’re very good friends. I adore him, but we’re very different people, so they were smart enough to write characters that reflected that.”

— Patrick Stewart

36. “Laurence Olivier said if you have ambition to be a serious classical actor, you must be as fit as an athlete. For me, the breakthrough was going to live in California. I exercised. I drank less. It was one of the things about California that had a positive impact on me.”

— Patrick Stewart

37. “It’s not just an exclamation, but it’s a rejection of everything to do with Christmas, with the spirit of Christmas, with gift-giving, with generosity.”

— Patrick Stewart

38. “Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare’s world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend – someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.”

— Patrick Stewart

39. “I’ve met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it’s just not worth working with them.”

— Patrick Stewart

40. “I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It’s absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.”

— Patrick Stewart

41. “I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I’d thought about from time to time, but it was completely unrealistic.”

— Patrick Stewart

42. “Roddenberry had created quite a complex and at times mysterious character. Guarded, cautious, careful in showing his feelings in expressing his ideas about many things – I found that very interesting.”

— Patrick Stewart

43. “During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that’s all. It was part of our job.”

— Patrick Stewart

44. “But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.”

— Patrick Stewart

45. “I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.”

— Patrick Stewart

46. “Tom Hanks knows the name of all the episodes.”

— Patrick Stewart

47. “I don’t do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you!”

— Patrick Stewart

48. “One of the things that I’ve come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I’m talking about myself.”

— Patrick Stewart

49. “Where can I go that would give me the same level of satisfaction as an actor?”

— Patrick Stewart

50. “Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.”

— Patrick Stewart