Thursday, September 08, 2011

From the Archive: 32 Things Star Trek Taught Me

1. "There are a million things in this universe you can have and a million things you can't have. It's no fun facing that, but that's the way things are." ("Charlie X")

2. "Morals are for men, not Gods." ("Where No Man Has Gone Before")

3. "We all have our darker side. We need it! It's half of what we are. It's not ugly...it's human." ("The Enemy Within")

4. "The sound of male ego. You travel half way across the galaxy and it's still the same song." ("Mudd's Women")

5. "Worlds may change, galaxies disintegrate, but a woman always remains a woman." ("The Conscience of the King")

6. "War is never imperative." ("Balance of Terror")

7. "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." ("Shore Leave")

8. "Life and death are seldom logical." ("The Galileo Seven")

9. "Madness has no purpose. Or reason. But, it may have a goal." ("The Alternative Factor")

10. "Freedom is never a gift: it has to be earned." ("Return of the Archons")

11."If there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. ("This Side of Paradise")

12. "A lie is a poor way to say hello." ("City on the Edge of Forever")

13. "You may find that having is not nearly so pleasing a thing as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true." ("Amok Time")

14. "In every revolution there's one man with a vision." ("Mirror, Mirror")

15. "Vulcans never bluff." ("The Doomsday Machine")

16. "Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad..." ("I, Mudd")

17. "The idea of male and female are universal constants..." ("Metamorphosis")

18. "There's an old, old saying on earth, Mr. Sulu: "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." ("Friday's Child")

19. "Everyone feeds on death, even vegetarians." ("Wolf in the Fold")

20. "Too much of anything -- even love -- is not necessarily a good thing." ("The Trouble with Tribbles"")

21. "They used to say if mankind could fly, he'd have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to." ("Return to Tomorrow")

22. "Without followers, evil cannot spread." ("And the Children Shall Lead")

23. "Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality." ("Spectre of the Gun")

24. "Only a fool fights in a burning house." ("Day of the Dove")

25. "The release of emotion is what keeps us healthy. Emotionally healthy." ("Plato's Stepchildren")

26. "We must acknowledge – once and for all – that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis." ("Mark of Gideon")

27. "Herbert was a minor official, notorious for his rigid and limited patterns of thought." ("The Way to Eden")

28. "We all create God in our own image." ("The Motion Picture")

29. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one." ("The Wrath of Khan")


30. "The needs of the one... outweigh the needs of the many." ("The Search for Spock")

31. "Maybe he's [God] not out there, Bones. Maybe he's right here. The human heart." ("The Final Frontier")

32. "Logic is the beginning of wisdom...not the end." ("The Undiscovered Country")

2 comments:

  1. steve prefontaine7:51 AM

    John, just with regards to number 3, out so-called "darker side" is only refered to as our "darker side" in the first place because we are still unfortunate enough to be living in "THE TIME OF SEXUAL REPRESSION" (which is how our period of history will always be remembered by future historians). When "THE TIME OF SEXUAL REPRESSION" has finally been brought to a thankful and merciful end there will be no such thing as "the dark side" because everything will have become totally normalised and accepted and nothing will be offensive or objectionable to anyone anymore. Always remember, so-called morality is infinitely malleable and changable, what is supposedly offensive or objectionable to one generation isn`t to the next, thats what makes a total nonsense of morality as an actual concept and why the word and its meaning must be completely abandoned at some point so that that our society can finally move forward without being hindered by that hogwash anymore. "THE TIME OF SEXUAL REPRESSION", what a hideous time in history to have been born into, living through the time of the plague 700 years ago would have been more pleasant, literally ! ! !.

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  2. Brilliant! You should write one of those little Trek philosophy books around these "32 Things Star Trek Taught Me!" Too bad there aren't any obvious quotes from TAS...

    Gordon Long

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