There are two types of people in this world — those who love William Shatner as the “Priceline Negotiator,” and those who love him as space philosopher and Adonis Captain James Tiberius Kirk. We tend to side with the latter. No one pauses during a speech like old Jim, commanding his fleet with the wisdom of an ancient sage (when he wasn’t busy wooing space’s female population). Today is Shatner’s 84th birthday, so join us in remembering these philosophical musings from one of pop culture’s greatest characters.
“Genius doesn’t work on an assembly line basis. . . . You can’t simply say, ‘Today I will be brilliant.'”
“A little suffering is good for the soul.”
“How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life.”
“Conquest is easy. Control is not.”
“Without freedom of choice there is no creativity. The body dies.”
“There are a million things in this universe you can have and there are a million things you can’t have. It’s no fun facing that, but that’s the way things are.”
“Hang on tight and survive. Everybody does.”
“You either believe in yourself or you don’t.”
“You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there’s no such thing as the unknown — only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.”
“Death. Destruction. Disease. Horror. That’s what war is all about. That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided.”
“We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers . . . but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill — today!”
“A balance of power — the trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all, but the only one that preserves both sides.”
“They used to say that if Man was meant to fly, he’d have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to.”
“Most legends have their basis in fact.”
“There’s another way to survive — mutual trust and help.”
“The prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other.”
“Intuition, however illogical, Mr. Spock, is recognized as a command prerogative.”
“Sometimes a feeling is all we humans have to go on.”
“Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young.”
“A captain of a ship, no matter his rank, must follow the book.”
“Most people are afraid of being alone.”
“You go slow, be gentle. It’s no one-way street — you know how you feel and that’s all. It’s how the girl feels, too. Don’t press. If the girl feels anything for you at all, you’ll know.”
“Beauty . . . survives.”
“Love sometimes expresses itself in sacrifice.”
“If I can have honesty, it’s easier to overlook mistakes.”