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.
JESSE OWENSIf 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.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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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.
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I’d noticed him watching me for a year or so, especially when we’d play games where there was running or jumping.
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Find the good. It’s all around you. Find it, showcase it and you’ll start believing in it.
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Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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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.
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I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
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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.
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Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.
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Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.
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Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.
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The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.
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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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I fought, I fought harder, but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.
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To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.
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If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
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I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.
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The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
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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.
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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?
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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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I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.
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It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.
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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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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.
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The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
JESSE OWENS