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.
JESSE OWENSThe only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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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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We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
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A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
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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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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 fought, I fought harder, but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.
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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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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’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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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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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.
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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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If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
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Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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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.
JESSE OWENS






