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 OWENSThe only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
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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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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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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. 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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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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Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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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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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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When 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?
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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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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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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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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.
JESSE OWENS