Jackie Robinson Quotes
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If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.
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There's not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.
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My protest about the post exchange seating bore some results. More seats were allocated for blacks, but there were still separate sections for blacks and for whites. At least I had made my men realize that something could be accomplished by speaking out, and I hoped they would be less resigned to unjust conditions.
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I guess you'd call me an independent, since I've never identified myself with one party or another in politics. I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label.
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The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.
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This is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice, and race hatred because we have witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such cruel and fallacious policy.
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Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.
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How you played in yesterday's game is all that counts.
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When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.
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Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he's losing; nobody wants you to quit when you're ahead.
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The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.
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It would make everything I worked for meaningless if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.
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After two years at UCLA, I decided to leave. I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job.
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A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.
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You can hate a man for many reasons, his color isn't one of them.
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I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
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My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people's kids than I did my own.
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Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.
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It kills me to lose. If I'm a troublemaker, and I don't think that my temper makes me one, then it's because I can't stand losing. That's the way I am about winning, all I ever wanted to do was finish first.
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In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.
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Blacks have had to learn to protect themselves by being cynical but not cynical enough to slam the door on potential opportunities. We go through life walking a tightrope to prevent too much disillusionment.
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During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake. One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known - Nominee Barry Goldwater.
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The colonel replied that he didn't care how my men had got the job done. He was happy that it had been accomplished. He said that, obviously, no matter how much or how little I knew technically, I was able to get the best out of people I worked with.
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The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.