Artists who believe that will never take the chances necessary to create anything great. Heck, anything worthwhile is going to be disliked by some people. The stronger the positive impression you leave in some people, the stronger the negative impression you'll leave in others, and vice-versa. The only way to avoid offending anyone is to delight no one, to make something utterly banal and pointless. To create anything worthwhile, artists have to be willing to have their work disliked. Gene Roddenberry was willing to have his work disliked by people who didn't want to see women and people of color included as equals, by people who expected science fiction to be silly fluff for children, by people uneasy with boundary-pushing sexual content, even by the tobacco executives who sponsored so many TV shows at the time. If he had "accepted reality" and refused to risk being disliked, if he had limited himself to some absolutist dogma about what creators "should" do, we never would've had Star Trek at all. Or we would've had it in a far more superficial and banal form that would've made far less of an impact.
