Jackie Robinson

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as mortals.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.

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

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

You are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making and live a free, and if you will, a sober and industrious life. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution and has given me his grace to keep it.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.