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.

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.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

I don’t like needing anyone for anything.

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.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

When a man is just and firm in his purpose, the citizens burning to approve a wrong or the frowning looks of a tyrant. Do not shake his fixed mind, nor the Southwind. Wild lord of the uneasy Adriatic, nor the thunder in the mighty hand of Jove: Should the heavens crack and tumble down, as the ruins crushed him he would not fear.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.