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Rod Serling Quotes

Total quotes: 48
“If you want to prove that God is not dead first prove that man is alive.”
— Rod Serling, Rod Serling | About Rod Serling | American Masters | PBS
Tagged: atheism, God
“The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.”
— Rod Serling, As I Knew Him
Tagged: Writing, Social Criticism, Conscience
“The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in, becoming narcissistic.”
— Rod Serling, Rod Serling- Wikipedia
Tagged: Obscenity, Narcissism, Apathy
“Television is very much like the weather: Much can be said of it, but very damn little can be done about it.”
— Rod Serling, Rod Serling speaking at UCLA 11/11/1966
Tagged: Television, Weather
“I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”
— Rod Serling, Notable American Unitarians 1936-1961
Tagged: ficion, Democrats, republican, Writing, Martians
“As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die just because the man dies.”
— Rod Serling, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone
Tagged: Legend, Immortality
“It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms—all of them—may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.”
— Rod Serling, As I Knew Him
Tagged: Writing, Truth, Courage
“Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.”
— Rod Serling, Dimensions Behind the Twilight Zone
Tagged: state, dignity, Ideology, Humanism
“Someplace between apathy and anarchy is the stance of the thinking human being; he does embrace a cause, he does take a position, and can’t allow it to become business as usual. Humanity is our business.”
— Rod Serling, TV(The Book)
Tagged: Apathy, Anarchy, humanity
“The crowd slowly dispersed in soft, whispering groups, voices muted by the fascination of death that all men carry with them in small pockets deep inside them.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Death
“No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact: for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized.”
— Rod Serling, The Shelter (The Twilight Zone)- Wikipedia
Tagged: human race, civilization
“You see. No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is like a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning.”
— Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone(1959) s03e16 Episode Script | SS
Tagged: Shock
“Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible.”
— Rod Serling, The new sci-fi
Tagged: Fantasy, Science Fiction
“...a medium best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has its product pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and has its dramatic teeth yanked out one by one.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Writing, Television
“I'm afraid that if I started to ponder who I am and what I am, I might not like what I find.”
— Rod Serling, Twilight Zone Encyclopedia
Tagged: Self-awareness, Self-hatred
“I'm a Western-cultured man who subscribes to the ancient saw that men do not cry, I don't cry either. I'll go to a movie, for example, and not infrequently something triggers the urge to weep, but I don't allow myself.”
— Rod Serling, Western Culture, Movies
“According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth. It is man’s prerogative—and woman’s—to create their own particular and private hell.”
— Rod Serling, Night Call- Wikipedia
Tagged: Bible, Heaven, God, Hell
“If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.”
— Rod Serling, The Great Forgetting
Tagged: Magic, Sorcery, Human Spirit
“Rest in peace, you age of innocence—you beautiful, serene, carefree, pre-Pearl Harbor, long summer night. We’ll never see your likes again.”
— Rod Serling, Black Belt
Tagged: Innocence, Summer, Pearl Harbor
“There won’t be any more merry-go-rounds. No more cotton candy. No more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you, Martin, that this is the wonderful time. Now! Here! That’s all. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”
— Rod Serling, A quote from Stories from the Twilight Zone
Tagged: Merry-go-rounds, Cotton Candy
“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Brainwashing, Thinking
“Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
— Rod Serling, A quote by Rod Serling
Tagged: Writing, Acting
“If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Survival, Second Amendment
“Hollywood's a great place to live...if you're a grapefruit.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Hollywood
“The first sale, that's the one that comes with magic.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Salesmanship, Magic
“Justice can span years. Retribution is not subject to a calendar.”
— Rod Serling, Spaceships and Politics
Tagged: Justice, Retribution
“When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me.”
— Rod Serling, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone
Tagged: Hometown
“Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.”
— George Taylor, Planet of the Apes
Tagged: Paws, Stinking, damned, dirty, Ape
“Being like everybody is the same as being nobody.”
— Rod Serling, Twilight Zone "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You."
“There's a saying, ‘Every man is put on Earth condemned to die, time and method of execution unknown.’ Perhaps this is as it should be. Case in point: Walter Bedeker, lately deceased. A little man with such a yen to live. Beaten by the devil, by his own boredom, and by the scheme of things in this, the Twilight Zone.”
— Rod Serling, Escape Clause- Wikipedia
Tagged: Bored, satan
“In his grave, we praise him for his decency—but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own….We must act on the altogether proper assumption that Martin Luther King asked for nothing but that which was his due... He asked only for equality, and it is that which we denied him.”
— Rod Serling, The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California on April 8, 1968 · Page 109
Tagged: Martin Luther King Jr, Equality, Eulogy
“I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Prejudice
“I got the idea for the pilot while walking through an empty lot of a movie studio. There were all the evidences of a community but with no people. I felt at the time a kind of encroaching loneliness, and desolation; a feeling of how nightmarish it would be to wind up in a city with no inhabitants.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Writing, Community, Loneliness
“This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you're on a through route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable...Go as far as you like on this road. Its limits are only those of mind itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, you're entering the wondrous dimension of imagination. Next stop: The Twilight Zone.”
— Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone
Tagged: Imagination, bizarre, Fantasy
“A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ—but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don't look for it in the Twilight Zone—look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”
— Rod Serling, I Am the Night—Color Me Black- Wikipedia
Tagged: Hate, virus, Twilight Zone
“I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.”
— Rod Serling, As I Knew Him
Tagged: Christmas
“In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have been on, you know, I'll take my lick. They're mine and that's the way I wanted them.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Writing
“You see, we can feed the stomach with concentrates, we can supply microfilm for reading, recreation, even movies of a sort, we can pump oxygen in, and waste material out, but there’s one thing we can’t simulate. That’s a very basic need. Man’s hunger for companionship. The barrier of loneliness, that’s one thing we haven’t licked yet.”
— Rod Serling, A quote by Rod Serling
Tagged: Microfilm, Loneliness
“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition; and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.”
— Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone(1959-64) Original Introduction
Tagged: Fear, Superstition, Twilight Zone, Infinite
“How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.”
— Rod Serling
Tagged: Television, advertisements
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