Jackie Robinson

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Believe that each day that shines on you is your last.

I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

All diseases run into one, old age.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then