“The people who know basketball, their elevators don’t go to the top.”

It’s a profession in which, the longer you stay, the closer you are to being fired.

Butch, you come from DeWitt Clinton. There are five thousand brothers in that school.

A box score does not properly represent the most important thing – team play. It shows some guy scoring 27 points, but it doesn’t show that my 27-point man let his guy score 30.

A team should be an extension of a coach’s personality. My teams are arrogant and obnoxious.

Most people zero in on their failures. I try to keep all my attention on a pyramid type philosophy rather than the averaging-down philosophy.

I don’t know why people question the academic training of an athlete.

You’re the best there. You’ve been all-city two years in a row. How bad can you be? You come with me and we’ll make nice music.

My rule was I wouldn’t recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house.

Live every day as if it were Saturday night.

I’m an Einstein of the streets and an Oxford scholar of common sense.

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

It’s so ridiculous to see a golfer with a one foot putt and everybody is saying “Shhh” and not moving a muscle.

Then we allow nineteen year-old kids to face a game-deciding free throw with seventeen thousand people yelling.

That’s it. Curtains. Off to the races. Treetops. Seashells and balloons.

Can’t win without talent, you know.

No matter what you’re going through, it makes you forget about your problems. I think the world should keep laughing.

Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.

When you leave the house, it isn’t safe. The air you breathe isn’t going to be safe, not for very long. That’s why you have to enjoy the moment.

My advice to teens is to try and do something that scares you every day because it’s the only way you can test how far you can really go.

I think if you’re fame-hungry, go out to a nightclub and get drunk… why do that?

I want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it is to get acquainted with fish swimming in the ocean, rather than just swimming with lemon slices and butter.