“Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

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.

Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.

Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.

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.

I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn’t in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I’d learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.

Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.

One chance is all you need.

If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.

It’s like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.

It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.

After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job.

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?

For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.

I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.

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.

I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.

The arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.

You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.

I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.

The front line with ISIS isn’t just in Iraq and Syria, it’s in Kennedy Airport and the Rio Grande. Border security is national security.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.

What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.

It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.