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I had such a crazy life. How I got away with it, I don't know.
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I never went to church. The priests couldn't scare me with all that crap about hell, but somehow I knew, inside of me somehow, I knew that I'd pay for it.
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If I got a beating for something, I usually deserved it.
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Ask most guys what their ambition is, and they'll say they want to get rich. But when they get rich, they discover it's not what they wanted at all. I don't want to be rich.
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I was a sick animal. I was jealous. I was vicious.
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All my life I made a living out of hurting people. Now, I make a living out of making people laugh.
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I hypnotized myself so in my subconscious, I believed I couldn't get hurt. And I don't mean 'believe' - I mean believe believe believe.
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I don't know how to back up.
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Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest, pound-for-pound, ever. He fought most of his career with just one loss, and that was to me. He had 131 fights with one loss.
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There was only one thing I wanted out of life. That was to be the champ.
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I was able to convince my body that I could take it and nobody could hurt me. I might've gotten cut, stitches over my eyes. Broken nose. Broken hands. But I never really got hurt.
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I fought in Detroit 23 times.
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I used to psyche myself out. Only, back then, we didn't know the word 'psyche.'
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When you're No. 1 contender for five years, and you know who's controlling things, you'll do something you're not proud of.
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I conditioned myself many years ago that nobody could hurt me.
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You can't go into the ring and be a nice guy.
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The world knows me as the Raging Bull.
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I made a million, and I lost a million.
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I was tough at a very young age, where I was just fighting all the time.
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Lot of guys can take punches. The idea is not to take unnecessary punishment.
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You have to treat everybody the right way. Otherwise, you'll have a short life. God bless.
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Besides being a slum kid with no great education in anything except how to fight and stay alive and steal, I also had this temper.
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Something's bound to happen to you in a tough fight: cut eye, broken nose or broken hand or something like that. So you could make excuses out of anything, you know, but you got to keep on going if you're a champ or you're a contender.
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I fought from the time I was eight years old, sometimes three, four fights a night. We did it to eat, and we did it because we were just tough kids.