Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett & Nicholas Meyer

The real line belongs to a four-way screenplay credit, and a contested one. Paramount, dissatisfied with the first script by Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes, brought in producer Harve Bennett (1930–2015) and Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer (b. 1945) to rewrite it, from a story by Bennett and Leonard Nimoy, who directed. Meyer and Bennett were originally credited alone; Krikes and Meerson filed for arbitration with the Writers Guild and were awarded credit as well — a ruling that, by Meyer's account, embittered him for years. Wikipedia records that Meyer wrote the 20th-century Earth middle portion, which is where this line falls, but no source assigns the sentence itself to any one of the four, so it is the credited team's line rather than a single writer's.