“My name’s been on this check for a week now.”

But it is a black man’s game, and it will be forever.

When I go to the line I’m thinking ‘All net.’ When I don’t think that, I’m likely to miss.

I just shoot until I feel good.

Practice habits were crucial to my development in basketball.

Whether it’s a tie game or down by 1 or up by five, it was always the same shot. So I always felt comfortable with the ball in my hands because it was in there a million times before.

I don’t think that once you get to one level, you can relax. You’ve got to keep pushing.

I’m a firm believer in that you play the way you practice.

I wanted to compete at the highest level again – and that’s the NBA.

I didn’t play against the toughest competition in high school, but one reason I was able to do well in college was that I mastered the fundamentals.

You never make any of the shots you never take. 87% of the ones you do take, you’ll miss too. I make 110% of my shots.

Leadership is diving for a loose ball, getting the crowd involved, getting other players involved. It’s being able to take it as well as dish it out. That’s the only way you’re going to get respect from the players.

Basketball was always a game to me. One of the greatest things in life for me was to be able to play what I loved dearly and get paid for it. So it was always a game to me and that’s how I perceived everything.

The best players will play. That’s the way it will always be.

I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.

Once you are labeled ‘the best’ you want to stay up there, and you can’t do it by loafing around.

I like being by myself.

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

There is nothing more tragic than to come to the end of life and know we have been on the wrong course.

I have clearly recorded this: for one can learn good lessons also from what has been tried but clearly has not succeeded, when it is clear why it has not succeeded.

The quest of the truth had been born in me – the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests.

I’ve been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.

Many men ridicule the idea that it can be scientifically handled. They tell us the unemployed have always been with us, and always must be. It is the oldest reason in the world for tolerating injustice and misery.

The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.

Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions.