Top 100 Rod Serling Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Being like everybody is the same as being nobody.”

— Rod Serling

2. “Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.”

— Rod Serling

3. “Every Superstate has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and the truth is a menace.”

— Rod Serling

4. “Every man is put on earth condemned to die. Time and method of execution unknown.”

— Rod Serling

5. “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”

— Rod Serling

6. “Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.”

— Rod Serling

Featured in: Creative Quotes

7. “It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.”

— Rod Serling

8. “The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.”

— Rod Serling

9. “You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

— Rod Serling

10. “Someplace between apathy and anarchy is the stance of the thinking human being. He does embrace a cause, he does take a position, and can’t allow it to become business as usual. Humanity is our business.”

— Rod Serling

11. “There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.”

— Rod Serling

12. “Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it. I succumbed to it.”

— Rod Serling

13. “I think I would like to be in Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer. That kind of thing. Without disease.”

— Rod Serling

14. “If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.”

— Rod Serling

15. “Justice can span years. Retribution is not subject to a calendar.”

— Rod Serling

16. “Somewhere between apathy and anarchy lies the thinking human being.”

— Rod Serling

17. “I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”

— Rod Serling

18. “Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.”

— Rod Serling

19. “It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms – all of them – may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.”

— Rod Serling

20. “Star Trek, I thought, was a very inconsistent show, which at times sparkled with true ingenuity and pure science fiction approaches, and other times was more carnival-like, and very much more the creature of television than the creature of a legitimate literary form.”

— Rod Serling

21. “I just want people to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, “Oh, he was a writer.” That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.”

— Rod Serling

22. “You unlock the door with the key of imagination.”

— Rod Serling

23. “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

— Rod Serling

24. “But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask – particularly in The Twilight Zone.”

— Rod Serling

25. “A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ – but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone – look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”

— Rod Serling

26. “Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.”

— Rod Serling

27. “There are weapons that are simply thoughts. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.”

— Rod Serling

28. “For the record, suspicion can kill, and prejudice can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own, for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

— Rod Serling

29. “An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it’s uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general – no, that’s much more the exception than the rule.”

— Rod Serling

30. “I write much better in the nonconfines of the early morning than I do the clutter of the day.”

— Rod Serling

31. “If you write, fix pipes, grade papers, lay bricks or drive a taxi – do it with a sense of pride. And do it the best you know how. Be cognizant and sympathetic to the guy alongside, because he wants a place in the sun, too. And always... always look past his color, his creed, his religion and the shape of his ears. Look for the whole person. Judge him as the whole person.”

— Rod Serling

32. “All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes -all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers.”

— Rod Serling

33. “Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in the Twilight Zone.”

— Rod Serling

34. “Our greatest responsibility is not to be pencils of the past.”

— Rod Serling

35. “The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.”

— Rod Serling

36. “Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.”

— Rod Serling

37. “It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”

— Rod Serling

38. “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man... a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.”

— Rod Serling

39. “Somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. If you’re a really good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you’ll write, and you’ll be read.”

— Rod Serling

40. “I’m a Western-cultured man who subscribes to the ancient saw that men do not cry, I don’t cry either. I’ll go to a movie, for example, and not infrequently something triggers the urge to weep, but I don’t allow myself.”

— Rod Serling

41. “I find dictating in the mass media particularly good because you’re writing for voice anyway; you’re writing for people to say a line and, consequently, saying a line through a machine is quite a valid test for the validity of what you’re saying.”

— Rod Serling

42. “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”

— Rod Serling

43. “You see. No shock. No engulfment. No tearing assunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning.”

— Rod Serling

44. “I’d rather go along with this sense of illusion that I’m a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that’s preordained.”

— Rod Serling

45. “I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.”

— Rod Serling

46. “Why do I write? I guess that’s been asked of every writer. I don’t know. It isn’t any massive compulsion.”

— Rod Serling

47. “I guess we all have a little vaunting itch for immortality, I guess that must be it.”

— Rod Serling

48. “Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized.”

— Rod Serling

49. “If you want to prove that God is not dead first prove that man is alive.”

— Rod Serling

50. “Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.”

— Rod Serling