“Good basketball always starts with good defense!”

Offense is not equal opportunity

At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven’t called walking for 20 years, now you don’t know what it is. When you call walking, you’re about half right.

If you’re not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

Practice structure determines success.

The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

We should not have to push you to work hard, you should work hard because you want to be a great player.

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was ‘It will be O.K.’ I would wonder, ‘How the hell is it going to be O.K.?’ The worst word in the English language is ‘hope.’

I’ve never felt my job was to win basketball games – rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life.

I’m not sure sports writing is an art.

Basketball is a full court game, so every drill must be done full court.

As I’ve said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators – not recently – fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.

It has always been my thought that the most important single ingredient to success in athletics or life is discipline. I have many times felt that this word is the most ill-defined in all of our language.

I sit and wonder why no one uses the shot fake. The shot fake, when used correctly, can eliminate a defender

You are never going to be driven anywhere worthwhile, but you sure as hell drive yourself to a lot of great places. It is up to you to drive yourself there.

I tell you what really fries my ass. When somebody gets on me for the way I look. Fat. Overweight. Well, I may be overweight. But I’m sure not fat.

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.

Strength lies not in defense but in the attack.

Defense is a definite part of the game, and a great part of defense is learning to play it without fouling.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.

Only doubtful truths need defense.

Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.