Star Trek represented, and still does represent, the future we can have, a future that is beyond the petty squabbles we are dealing with here on Earth, now as much as ever, and are able to devote ourselves to the betterment of all human kind by doing what we do so well: explore. This kind of a future isn't impossible — and we need to all rethink our priorities to really bring that vision to life.

The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.

Why does everyone think the future is space helmets, silver foil, and talking like computers, like a bad episode of Star Trek?

On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Hawking smiled and said: I'm working on that.

Seven billion people on earth in the early 21st century, and FAITH decided to replicate a nerd slash engineer with a Star Trek fixation.

The night we elected Obama, CNN had holograms. They had fuckin' holograms. We have Star Wars technology now. What if that means Barack is gonna to be the miracle he seems to be? What if this really is the dawning of an amazing age? He gets in there, fixes the economy, gets us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We've got Osama bin Laden and George Bush in dunking booths filled with urine. You can just throw apples at em all day. And then what if he starts slinging amazing future technology on us. You know suddenly we get hover boots and teleportation pills and there's floating cars everywhere. At that point, would there be like two remaining holdout racists left? Like the last two guys down in Arkansas, in their hover boots? Just going, "Yeah, there's that nigger that gave us anti-gravity. I'm gonna be late to the cross burning. My free government blowjob robot broke. Fuckin' bullshit. This guy's the worst president ever. Just like a black guy to give you a blowjob robot for free and it breaks after 6 years. This sucks."

Yes, he called Voyager “V’ger,” in reference to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But he’s not a Trekkie. Because “Trekkies are weird.

Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow — it's not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans. No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids — human beings built them, because they're clever and they work hard. And Star Trek is about those things.

It blew me away that almost two hundred years after Shatner first famously didn’t actually say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” people still knew Star Trek. Now that’s a franchise.

Listen, Q, don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but in Starfleet, we save the universe and fuck the green alien chick twice before breakfast, every day. We’ve got this one, dude.

There's a deep thirst and hunger to know more about space, literally because of the Star Trek phenomenon.

I told Gene after the end of the first season that I would not be returning to the show — that I wanted to return to my first love, which is musical theatre, but I didn’t know that meeting a Star Trek fan would change my life. I was told a fan wanted to meet me, and I turned and looked into the face of Dr. Martin Luther King — I was breathless. He said, "Yes, I'm the Trekker — I'm a Star Trek fan." And he told me that Star Trek was one of the only shows that his wife Coretta and he would allow their little children to stay up and watch. I thanked him — and I told him I was leaving the show. All the smile came off his face and he said: "You can’t do that." He said "Don’t you understand that for the first time, we’re seen as we should be seen? You don’t have a Black role — you have an equal role." And on I went back to work on Monday morning. I went to Gene’s office and told him what had happened over the weekend. And he said, "Welcome home. We have a lot of work to do."

Maybe that would be less crucial under Obama, Podesta thought, because Obama's approach was so intellectual. He compared Obama to Spock from Star Trek. The president-elect wanted to put his own ideas to work. He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics, seizing the moment of 2008 and driving it to a political victory.