George Takei Quotes

… democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training school for making first-class men. It is life's gymnasium..fit for freedom’s athletes… Whatever we do not attain, we at any rate attain the experiences of the fight, the hardening of the strong campaign, and throb with currents of attempt at least.

I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender.

I have to make decisions that people are a little confused about, in a way, and I just express the appreciation, admiration and respect I have. I just try to be the best I can, but I'm human.

People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves.

I'll never believe that Americans have racticed in our history anything close to the purest form of democracy of the world. Because there are lots of democracies around the world that function better than ours does. It's always been that way. There's some truth to the idea that it's rigged, but there is a way that it's supposed to work that.

I'd like to think that "President Obama believed deeply in this democracy and the American people."

The more people participate in the process of their own education, and the more people participate in defining what kind of production to produce, and for what and why, the more people participate in the development of their selves. The more people become themselves, the better the democracy.

You do not keep American democracy in suspense. Because, look, too many people have marched and protested and fought and died for this democracy.

In America, we've got to get back to these base principles of what democracy is.

People who say it was her father who prepared her for the post of prime minister, it was her father who launched her, are wrong.

The very essence of democracy is the absolute faith that while people must cooperate, the first function of democracy, its peculiar gift, is to develop each individual into everything that he might be.

If democracy is control by the people, as it is supposed to be, it is the right form of government. I believe in a complete democracy - individual, political, social, economic. If we really had that, which we don't now, it would be in harmony with divine purpose.

I wish I could take back some of the things I said and some of the things I did. But in the bigger picture, I don't feel that it was violent and terrible. I feel like it was primarily--obviously not completely--moral, based on a vision that the government should be better, and that people could be better, and that democracy should be real.

Most people that I know don believe that a handful of corporations request sit together without disclosure, by the way, and pump hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process. That is not the democracy that many of us believe America should be.

My parents were true believers in the efficacy of American constitutional democracy, and I was thoroughly inculcated with reverence for what we the people are capable of doing. The complication in that simple narrative is that as I got older, the Vietnam War shook my confidence in how our democracy was working. I ended up serving in that war, but it started with a lie, and I was very proud of my father for being one of its earliest opponents.

I've never made an excuse of not knowing my father, because I've had great people in my life.

It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people.

I hope I'm at least half the dad that he didn't have to be.

American democracy and the Soviet system can exist simultaneously and compete peacefully. But one cannot develop into the other.

I don't look back, I just go forward. I'm just proud of the fact that my parents were immigrants and we had nearly nothing, and all of the sudden, with the help of a lot of people and my parents as a model, I amounted to something.

I fortunately know very many people, and there are many, many more that I don't know and many politicians who stand up for the same values of democracy of liberal societies, of open societies of respect for the dignity of man.

Cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.

Even in a fake democracy, people ought to get what they want once in a while.

We must have faith in the people of this country and faith in our principles.

The essence of what it is to be American is the deep moral urge to be free, to freely express yourself and have the right to do so, and to look at all people as equals.