Here are a few of my favourites:-
SPOCK: "I have never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer to any question."
You don't have to travel to Vulcan to hear variations of this one, which I hazard a guess are spoken in pubs, male changing rooms and on golf courses up and down the land every minute of the day. Spock's role in Star Trek was to play the ultra-logical and straight-forward foil to Captain Kirk's more complex, emotional and 'human' character. It is a dynamic very closely reflected in intimate male-female relationships. Avoiding the question is also a favourite technique of politicians of course. In living room Newsnight studios up and down the land, Paxman-like husbands desperately struggle to extract straight answers from their wily counterparts, but to no avail. If you want to hold onto a bar of wet soap, don't grip tighter. I think the message that the writer Roddenberry was trying to convey with his characters is that there is no one right or wrong way of approaching life, that our differences should be accepted and celebrated as they are the very things that make life so interesting. Having said that, Spock is clearly the best! ;-)
For some more wonderful celebration of the differences between men and women in relationships, visit Mil and Margaret. You have to scroll down a bit for the really good ones.
SPOCK: "Every living thing wants to survive."
I have often been known to have friendly debates with members of some of the world's larger religions and one of the questions they come up with is something along the lines of: 'If there is no God or if the Bible / Koran / L Ron Hubbard do not speak absolute truth, then how do we know the difference between good and bad?" The above quote provides the essence of the answer to this, although it is stated a little naively. Dawkins would argue that it is genes and not actual organisms that 'want to' survive. That is how it is possible for one person to give up their lives for their children, their community or their country. Because by doing so they are doing what is necessary to make it most likely that most of their genes will survive into the future.
All moral questions can be boiled down to that. What course of action is most likely to ensure that me, my family, my country, my species survive and thrive. That is why some moral questions are fairly easy and fixed. Such as: "Is it wrong to kill people for fun?" It is easy to see that any community that held the view that it is OK to kill people for fun would quickly face some survival problems. But other questions are much harder to answer using this criterion. Such as: "Is it wrong to be gay?" Although I do not agree with them, is possible for people to come up with reasons why homosexuality might be bad for a community. It is also possible for others to strongly counter these views, and so this is a moral question which divides opinion and also one for which the majority consensus changes over time, so that laws which once made homosexuality illegal are repealed.
The fact that some questions are easier to answer than others, and the fact that the majority consensus on moral issues shifts over time, reinforces the idea that the notions of good, bad, right and wrong are born out of one simple biological instinct: survive!
SPOCK: "I remind you that humans are only a tiny minority in this galaxy."
This is a very poignant message for our time, attacking the arrogance of human beings who assume that we are in some way superior to all the other species with which we share our planet and can therefore do whatever we want with them. It would be interesting to know how we would treat other creatures should we ever discover life elsewhere in the universe. Would it be OK to ruthlessly exploit these creatures if we were able? Would we kill and eat them as we do our fellow Earthlings? How would we decide?
"Hang on a minute!" You may be thinking. "You just said it simply comes down to a matter of survival, so bollocks to the other species". Well, exactly, and by ignoring the long-game, by thinking that it is OK just to exploit the planet's resources so that generations close to us can prosper, we unwittingly may condemn our species to extinction down the line. Ecologists would point to the fact that every species plays an essential role in a complex network of interaction of which we are only a tiny part. Yet we wantonly destroy parts of the wondrous system that has sustained our species for millennia so that we can get short-term gratification in the form of material wealth. That means that ultimately our species may not survive, and that is why it is foolish and arrogant of us to consider ourselves superior to any other species. The crocodiles are probably laughing at us behind our backs. They've been around the block and seen it all before.
There are plenty more in the Spock Quote Generator, but that's all from me today folks. Until the next time, live long and prosper!
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