Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.

As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering.

The people who could do most to improve the situation of so many women and children are in fact, men.

Violence is never ever a choice that a man should make.

I wouldn't know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me.

I wasn't campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you've got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time.

Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare’s world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend—someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.

Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.

I'm saying I'm in love with you! I've been in love with you this whole bleeding year!

Like the cotton-carder who combs tangled cotton into a long bundle of fibre, you take all my knotted fragments and comb them into light.

You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me. Why? Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved.

I understood early that beauty was power.

Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place

Worrying is wasted time. Use the same energy for doing something about whatever worries you.

A dream acting role would be Matt Damon in the Bourne series. I would love to do something like that!

My gut was always that if I taught students poetry, I would give too much of myself to them and have nothing left.