Jackie Robinson

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

I don’t like needing anyone for anything.

This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.

I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand.

Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me.

So different are the colors of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Tomorrow is always another day to make things right.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.