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.
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.
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.
JESSE OWENS -
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 OWENS -
It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.
JESSE OWENS -
For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.
JESSE OWENS -
I fought, I fought harder, but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.
JESSE OWENS -
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 -
One chance is all you need.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
JESSE OWENS -
I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS






