I fought, I fought harder, but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.
JESSE OWENSIt all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.
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If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard. The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.
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The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred’s ear.
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I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.
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The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
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The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
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He was constantly on me about the job that I was to do and the responsibility that I had upon the campus. And how I must be able to carry myself because people were looking.
JESSE OWENS -
The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.
JESSE OWENS -
I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn’t a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.
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We used to have a lot of fun. We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn’t have steak? Who had steak?
JESSE OWENS -
For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.
JESSE OWENS -
It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere – one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.
JESSE OWENS -
It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn’t even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards.
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If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
JESSE OWENS -
Although I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.
JESSE OWENS