Jackie Robinson

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

No matter how much or how little I knew technically, I was able to get the best out of people I worked with.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

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

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.

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

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

The amount of people in this world who are here to do something great far outweighs the rest.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.