“I will tell you King’s First Law of Recognition: You never get it when you want it, and then when it comes, you get too much.”

If you have one gay experience, does that mean you’re gay? If you have one heterosexual experience, does that mean you’re straight? Life doesn’t work quite so cut and dried.

When you oppress people either by gender, by race, by sexual orientation, when you do that and the doors become ajar, they will fly open and they will come and they have.

I always listen, I ask children, I even ask adults in tennis, “What are your children playing?” And most of the time it’s not tennis. It’s pathetic.

Ask Nureyev to stop dancing, ask Sinatra to stop singing, then you can ask me to stop playing.

There is no life for girls in team sports past Little League. I got into tennis when I realized this, and because I thought golf would be too slow for me, and I was too scared to swim.

Sports are a microcosm of society. It just shows how much more competition there is in the world.

Ever since that day when I was 11 years old, and I wasn’t allowed in a photo because I wasn’t wearing a tennis skirt, I knew that I wanted to change the sport.

Men still get a lot more opportunity. It is still a big part of the old boy network… They have more companies they can get money from.

When a child signs up for tennis, he or she is put on a team. I put them in a circle and then I make sure they name their own team.

We have, or have had women presidents or prime ministers in Liberia, Chile, Germany, Great Britain…and yet the US of A still hasn’t had a women president. It’s just beyond my thinking. Look at Congress.

You have got to want to be the best before you can even begin to reach for that goal, and you have got to be prepared to sacrifice a lot to get there.

I would love to be a player today. I had the right personality for it.

I think younger players probably just think they are who they are-they don’t think about coming out. Unless you’re number one in the world, nobody cares, usually.

Trust and respect is something you earn, not something that is given.

Women’s sports is still in its infancy. The beginning of women’s sports in the United States started in 1972, with the passage of Title 9 for girls to finally get athletic scholarships.

Martina and I went through a very bad five years. Everything’s very good between us now, but it was a long haul.

Realize that sleeping on a futon when you’re 30 is not the worst thing. You know what’s worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you’re not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate.

My child, seek those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the King against the Church, and urge upon him a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in return promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring.

It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn’t elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months.

The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you’ve won a great victory, now the war will end. And I’m certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.

Those who possess that treasure which no thief can take away, Which, though on suppliants freely spent, increaseth day by day,

The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin’s Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.

If horse racing is the sport of kings, then drag racing must be the sport of queens.