I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.
JESSE OWENSThe black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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I fought, I fought harder, but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.
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A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
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I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
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Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.
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People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you.
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The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred’s ear.
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The lives of most men are patchwork quilts. Or at best one matching outfit with a closet and laundry bag full of incongruous accumulations. A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
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The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
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After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job.
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I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.
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The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.
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If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
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Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn’t even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards.
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When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.
JESSE OWENS