Jesse Owens Quotes
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It's like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.
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We'd get into these little towns and tell 'em to get out the fastest guy in town and Jesse Owens would spot him ten yards and beat him.
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Although I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.
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Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it.
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It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler... You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Lutz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace. The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again. He was killed in World War II.
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One chance is all you need.
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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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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.
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For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.
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The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
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I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I'd learned long ago... the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
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People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.
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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.
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Life doesn't give you all the practice races you need.
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A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
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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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If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard.
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I'm old now. It's all right.
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Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close.
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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.
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I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
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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.