Jesse Owens Quotes

It’s like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.

Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.

It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.

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.

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?

For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.

I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.

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.

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?

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.