Arthur Ashe Quotes
There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.
Quotes to Explore
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Every ghetto you go to, Latinos and blacks are the two people that are together. We don't look at each other in any different way, like 'He's black; I'm Latino.' I look at us as one.
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Remember that life's big changes rarely give advance warning.
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Well what I will tell you is for this movie, I got into probably the best shape of my life.
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Let me tell you something - being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless and it is always transitory.
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Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.
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If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.
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The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.
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Cooking for people is an enormously significant expression of generosity and soulfulness, and entertaining is a way to be both generous and creative. You're sharing your life with people. Of course, it's also an expression of your own need for approval and applause. Nothing wrong with that.
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As we get used to women in power, we are likely to discover that they behave much like powerful men - vain, entitled, always looking for more.
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Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
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A lot of the time we think finances are immediately linked to experience, opportunities, image, and all sorts of important things that can progress us in life. Sometimes they're not. Finances can be completely irrelevant if you allow yourself to feel like things are going well.
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I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.
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When I was a kid, the miracles of my life were the Resurrection, a candlelight service on New Year's Eve, the Virgin Birth, and the Three Wise Men.
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I'm not that lazy, but I don't need that much money. I lead a fairly simple life.
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'Black Messiah' is a hell of a name for an album. It can easily be misunderstood. Many will think it's about religion. Some will jump to the conclusion that I'm calling myself a Black Messiah. For me, the title is about all of us. It's about the world. It's about an idea we can all aspire to. We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah.
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It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.
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I wrote a script with my brother which ended up, somehow, on the Black List in 2008.
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I am happy with being a tennis player and the choice I took when I was 12. But clearly, if I wouldn't have been a tennis player, I would have loved to be a soccer player. But again, I am happy with the choice I made.
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You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.
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There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
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It's a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.
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A woman without a degree of decency and delicacy is unsexed.
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Believing everybody is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous.
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There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.
