“I always had a lot of responsibilities. I just didn’t take them. I just decided to take care of my responsibilities, live up to them. That’s a pretty interesting job. It’s harder than being heavyweight champion of the world.”

You have to compete in life because if you don’t have no competition – no competition, no spirit, you know, you’ll fall under the slightest struggle.

Everybody wants to be somebody. Everybody wants to be noticed. Everybody wants to be somebody important. Importance is just treating people good. That’s important.

Hard times fall upon everybody. Whatever it is, we’re going to get out of it.

Confidence breeds success & success breeds confidence, Confidence applied properly surpasses genius.

Not to be egotistical, but I don’t think there is a man on this planet who can beat me.

People say ‘Poor guy.’ That insults me. I despise sympathy. So I screwed up. I made some mistakes. ‘Poor guy,’ like I’m some victim. There’s nothing poor about me.

What was most important was the knowledge [aspect] of the fight. I learned this early on and just told myself to “upgrade my mind.” That’s just what I wanted to do my whole life.

There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes, just don’t make the same ones. We don’t want to duplicate them.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.

There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. It’s an illusion of fear. Fear is an illusion. If you gonna die, you gonna die anyway; it’s not something to fear, fear is not gonna help.

At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older, life is totally about losing everything.

Yes, time flies. And where did it leave you? Old too soon, smart too late.

I’m the most brutal and ruthless conquerer there has ever been.

Anyone with a grain of sense would know that if I punched my wife I would rip her head off. It’s all lies. I have never laid a finger on her.

The mind is a real dangerous neighborhood to travel by ourselves.

There’s no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don’t want to close the door on it either.

When at a young age you learn to face your fears, that makes the difference between people being champions and people not being champions.

A champion shows who he is by what he does.

I wanted to be a world champion.

Wilder is not a big draw in the U.S. He maybe sells 5,000 to 10,000 tickets when he’s fighting in his own town for the heavyweight champion.

I’m a gypsy: no education, no schooling, nothing. I don’t care what people think of me. I don’t care about being a hero, a role model, a champion.

When I was a boxer, I wanted to be champion of the world, not the richest man in the world.

A champion shows who he is by what he does when he’s tested. When a person gets up and says ‘I can still do it’, he’s a champion.

Goliath was a champion, a monster who had never been beaten, and then this young guy, David, came forward, a child who believed in God and did it.