“It kills me to lose. If I’m a troublemaker, and I don’t think that my temper makes me one, then it’s because I can’t stand losing. That’s the way I am about winning, all I ever wanted to do was finish first.”

How you played in yesterday’s game is all that counts.

If I had to choose between baseball’s Hall of Fame and first class citizenship for all of my people. I would say first-class citizenship.

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.

The many of us who attain what we may and forget those who help us along the line we’ve got to remember that there are so many others to pull along the way. The farther they go, the further we all go.

Life is not a spectator sport.

At the beginning of the World Series of 1947, I experienced a completely new emotion when the National Anthem was played. This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for anyone else.

Relationships may change throughout the gift of time, memories stay the same forever in my mind.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

I know that I am a black man in a white world. I know that I never had it made.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

Pop flies, in a sense, are just a diversion for a second baseman. Grounders are his stock trade.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

You’re going to be a great player, kid.

Candor and generosity, unless tempered by due moderation, leads to ruin.

I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge. It’s the difference between being a judge and being a law professor.

He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased’; but he said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome.

I don’t have a short temper, I just have a quick reaction to bullshit.

One cannot be avenged for every wrong; according to the occasion, everyone who knows how, must use temperance.

When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it any place.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.