Jackie Robinson

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

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.

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.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

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

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

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.

Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

Not to be provok’d is best: But if mov’d, never correct till the Fume is spent; For every Stroke our Fury strikes, is sure to hit our selves at last.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.