George Takei Quotes

In the internment camp, there was nothing to do.

I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

It chills my soul to think of American children behind barbed wire.

I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.

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.

My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.

It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.

So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy.

When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.

In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.

I think if you come from a history of persecution you have to develop a sense of humour.

A patriotic native-born Japanese, if he wants to make his contribution, will submit himself to a concentration camp.

The continued retention of these innocent people would he a blot upon the history of this country.

When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

I was standing on a ladder outside the Homestead juvenile immigrant detention center outside Miami, looking over the fence, and I saw children lined up like prisoners. They had been separated from their families and put in this private detention facility. It was horrible.

I lost everything when they put us in prison. I was an enemy alien, a man without a country.

When the Emergency was proclaimed at midnight on 25 June 1975, they came to arrest me. I managed to escape by going to a friend's house nearby.

I have recurring nightmares about being in a Nazi concentration camp with all my family and constantly being sent to solitary confinement.

Three days doesn't sound like a very long time, and under normal, everyday circumstances, it's not - but under POW camp conditions, it doesn't take long to wear down a man's sanity.

Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors.

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

As you would expect, the loss of freedom and the lack of privacy are extremely difficult... I want you to know that I am well. I am safe, fit and healthy.

We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz

I told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was.