“A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.”

I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.

He was constantly on me about the job that I was to do and the responsibility that I had upon the campus. And how I must be able to carry myself because people were looking.

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.

I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn’t a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.

Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.

The 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.

I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn’t in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I’d learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.

Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.

One chance is all you need.

If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.

It’s like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.

Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.

It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.

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.

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.

In an artist’s life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.

Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.

I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.

Music is the soundtrack to life. It plays the melody of our being.

You cannot be loving when you are blaming. You cannot be loving when you are criticising. You cannot be loving when you are judging.

There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course; a quiet conscience.