Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.
JESSE OWENSTo a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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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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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 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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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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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.
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When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.
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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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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 lives of most men are patchwork quilts. Or at best one matching outfit with a closet and laundry bag full of incongruous accumulations. A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
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One chance is all you need.
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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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The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
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For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.
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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.
JESSE OWENS