To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.
JESSE OWENSTo a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.
JESSE OWENSLife doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.
JESSE OWENSHe 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 OWENSThe 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.
JESSE OWENSI 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.
JESSE OWENSAlthough 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 OWENSIf you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
JESSE OWENSIt 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 OWENSI 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.
JESSE OWENSI fought, I fought harder, but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.
JESSE OWENSThe only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
JESSE OWENSI let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
JESSE OWENSI always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.
JESSE OWENSAfter 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.
JESSE OWENSFriendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
JESSE OWENSWhen I came back, after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference?
JESSE OWENS