“A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.”

People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you.

I’d noticed him watching me for a year or so, especially when we’d play games where there was running or jumping.

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.

If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard. The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.

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.

I’ve always liked ladies all my life. I guess it started with my mom. So every time I saw a pretty lady, I thought, she’s pretty.

The blues are what I’ve turned to, what has given me inspiration and relief in all the trials of my life.

Why live in the darkness all your life? Why, if you are unhappy, if you are having a miserable time, why not just look at it? Why are you in the darkness? Look for the light. The light is within.

My job in this life is to give people spiritual ecstasy through music. In my concerts people cry, laugh, dance. If they climaxed spiritually, I did my job. I did it decently and honestly.

If I can help a kid discover a liking, or even a passion for music in their life, then that’s a wonderful thing.

And the time will come when you see, we’re all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

The best thing to do is find one person in your life and try to love them unconditionally. If you’ve accomplished that, you’ve accomplished a lot.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.