Jackie Robinson

I don’t like needing anyone for anything.

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

I’m grateful for all the breaks and honors and opportunities I’ve had, but I always believe I won’t have it made until the humblest black kid in the most remote backwoods of America has it made.

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

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

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which ‘The Recognitions’ ’ debt to ‘Ulysses’ was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read ‘Ulysses.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.

Be confident, not certain

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

The disciplined are free.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.