There's no great person that lived that didn't go through scrutiny or ridicule and prosecution in all types of ways, to be who they are in history.

The powers that be don’t want athletes or boxers to become as smart as they are.

Early on in my career I had the kind of anxious where you couldn't sleep at night. That anxiousness is like a virus we all have in us. Some you can deal with but some will wipe you out.

You think it's hard for me when I go in the ring and fight? That's the least of my problems. I think about the five years that I did in prison. I think about the nine years on parole. Nothing - nothing! - can compare to that struggle. I'm telling you, from being an ex-convict with 30 convictions, a degree nowhere to be found and black? I'm done.

I always not only want push the envelope in my career but I also have an itch for going against the grain.

I wouldn't wanna fight me, because I know it wouldn't be a good outcome for both.

It takes a very very strong individual not to be corrupt in any of those things as time moves on. Myself and other people who went that road and experienced that world, some got a second birth of life and some is in the dirt.