Captain Kirk’s Best Star Trek Quote From the Original Series Still Resonates 58 Years Later

Some lines of dialogue grow so famous they almost stop belonging to the movies and TV shows that produced them. “May the Force be with you.” “I’ll be back.” “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” You don’t need to know the context. The words have long since outgrown it.

Star Trek: The Original Series has plenty of lines like that. Spock’s wish that everyone “live long and prosper” is arguably the franchise’s signature phrase. He also turned the plain word “fascinating” into a catchphrase by raising one eyebrow before he said it. Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) spent three seasons reminding everyone, “I’m a doctor, not a…” and, at least in our collective memory, declaring “He’s dead, Jim” over the latest redshirt who wandered too far from the landing party.

But if I could pick only one line to represent everything Star Trek stands for, it would be four words spoken by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) halfway through “Return to Tomorrow,” the 20th episode of season 2:

“Risk is our business.”

It doesn’t look like an obvious choice. It shows up on T-shirts far less often than “live long and prosper.” People who have never watched an episode of Star Trek don’t quote it. And unlike “beam me up, Scotty,” it never entered the wider pop culture vocabulary. That is exactly why I think it’s the best quote. In four words, it captures Kirk and the whole philosophy of Star Trek.

The episode

“Return to Tomorrow” first aired on Feb. 9, 1968. The Enterprise answers a mysterious distress call from a dead planet. There, Kirk and his crew meet Sargon, one of three survivors of an ancient civilization that has lived as beings of pure energy for half a million years. Sargon asks Kirk, Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Dr. Ann Mulhall (Diana Muldaur) to lend him their bodies for a while. With them, he, his wife Thalassa and the ambitious Henoch can build android bodies and begin life again.

Dr. McCoy believes the aliens are manipulating the crew. Kirk believes the chance to learn from a civilization hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than humanity is worth the danger.

The episode is also the first of Diana Muldaur’s three Star Trek appearances. She plays Dr. Ann Mulhall here, then returns as Miranda Jones in the third-season episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” Years later, she became a series regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Dr. Katherine Pulaski. For trivia fans, “Return to Tomorrow” is also one of the times Spock describes Sargon as “pure energy,” a phrase longtime fans recognize right away.

Kirk faces the prospect of unimaginably powerful aliens occupying the bodies of his crew. He doesn’t issue an order. He makes an argument, reminding the crew that every leap forward in human history required someone willing to embrace uncertainty.

“They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings,” Kirk says. “But he did fly. He discovered he had to.” He compares Sargon’s offer to humanity’s own journey from the Moon to Mars and eventually the stars, and argues that the potential for knowledge outweighs the danger. Only then does he reach the four words that define both the captain and the franchise. Those words explain Kirk better than decades of pop-culture impressions ever could.

The real Kirk

For years, pop culture has reduced Kirk to a caricature: the swaggering captain who punches first, flirts with every alien woman he meets and somehow loses his shirt on every other away mission. The real Kirk is far more thoughtful. He takes risks, certainly, but he doesn’t enjoy gambling. He takes them because he believes some opportunities are too important to ignore.

Recklessness and accepting risk in pursuit of discovery are very different things. Kirk doesn’t claim danger is exciting. His point is that progress is impossible without it.

He is also explaining what separates Starfleet from almost every other organization. Plenty of fictional explorers travel because they’re ordered to. Others go for conquest, profit or survival. Starfleet goes because knowledge itself is worth pursuing.

That’s why I find the quote even more meaningful than the famous opening narration about boldly going where no one has gone before. The narration tells us what the Enterprise does. Kirk’s line explains why.

The power of optimism

The timing makes the speech more remarkable. “Return to Tomorrow” aired in early 1968, roughly 17 months before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. America was still trying to prove humans could reach another world, and Star Trek was already imagining the step beyond. Kirk’s speech places the Enterprise in the same lineage as every explorer who came before it. It suggests humanity’s future won’t be built by playing it safe.

That idea has become the beating heart of Star Trek. Optimism in the Star Trek universe has never meant believing everything will work out. It means believing the unknown is worth facing anyway.

The Original Series has more famous quotes. It has funnier ones. It certainly has more quotable ones. But no other line distills what Star Trek has always been trying to say as well as four words Kirk spoke nearly 60 years ago: “Risk is our business.”

Source: Polygon