Man must be in space -- that is what we are destined for. There is nothing else that we can do.

--MAJEL BARRETT

I have absolutely nothing to do with the Star Trek franchise. I haven't had for many, many years. Gene sold out all of his rights to Star Trek way back fifteen, almost twenty years ago. So, they ask nothing. I volunteer nothing. They invite me to a few of their shindigs. I'll bet you I haven't been on that lot in two years.

--MAJEL BARRETT

Why should we put 24 robotic missions up on Mars somewhere? That's silly. We could put people up on Mars. Why not let them do it because when something goes wrong only men can evaluate it. They can say what went wrong. One little dial isn't working correctly. Well, what's wrong with that dial? Somebody who is up there can take a look at it probably and come back and say maybe I don't know what it is but there it is and then we can fix it.

--MAJEL BARRETT

When you think of the age of the universe and the size of the universe, of course there is other intelligent life out there. Where we can find some that we can understand, that we can communicate with, that may be the problem.

--MAJEL BARRETT

See, Gene was a fantastic storyteller, probably the best in the business. What he did was tell stories. He didn't lay plots and ideas and things like that — he told stories. You can take any one of our stories that we use right now, put western clothes on us, stick us out in the west and they'll work just as well — any single one of them — because they're stories about people.

--MAJEL BARRETT

You put people in funny costumes and paint them green and we could talk about anything we wanted to ... that was the only thing that fascinated Gene about this particular genre.

--MAJEL BARRETT

When we started out in '64, um, I was playing Number One, which was a woman second in command of a starship. Now that was innovative, but of course NBC got ahold of it and 'You've got to get rid of the broad. No one will believe a woman second in control of a big star ship'. They said, 'You've got to get rid of the guy with the ears 'cos he looks too Satanic'. But the third thing was you've got to make it more men than women, because otherwise they're going to think there's a lot of hanky panky going on in the starship. Gene, realising that he was hitting his head against a wall, and realising what the mentality of the people who were making those decisions was, figured he would do in my case, although he knew it was going to break my heart, figured he would fight and keep the Spock character and marry the woman. So we all got basically what we wanted, and as far as the women are concerned, he figured that 30 good women could handle a crew of 300 anyway. So that's how we ended up with our crew.

--MAJEL BARRETT

We didn't have a background for her, so I created one. To me, she was from a different planet where they actually numbered people. She was one of a litter, let's say. The only time they would breed was when they needed people — they would clone them and try to get as much intelligence into each one as they could. As they were growing up they would take their place, and be given a position according to their excellence. She actually turned into Number One and therefore went onto a starship. It was a way of life, just a manner of being; she hadn’t done anything particularly wonderful until she got there and met people. She was bred for excellence, that's all. At the time, she was the one who really didn't have any emotions. Gene basically suggested that. That was the Number One character; that was my character.

--MAJEL BARRETT

This is a new land, this is a new place, this is a new world, this is unknown. This is uncharted, this is all there is. We don't have any other place to go. I always quote Gene as saying "Why are we now going into space? Well, why did we trouble to look past the next mountain? Our prime obligation to ourselves is to make the unknown known. We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are." And that was his whole philosophy of Star Trek, of life, of everything else.

--MAJEL BARRETT