Sammy Davis, Jr. Quotes

My handicap? Man, I am a one-eyed, black Jew! That's my handicap!

You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.

"The Entertainer" He did it all.

I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.

You have to be able to look back at your life and say, "Yeah, that was fun."

I have a respect for Elvis and my friendship. It ain't my business what he did in private. The only thing I want to know is, 'Was he my friend?', 'Did I enjoy him as a performer?', 'Did he give the world of entertainment something?' - and the answer is YES on all accounts. The other jazz just don't matter.

I had traveled 10 states and played over 50 cities by the time I was 4.

Savor the moments that are warm and special and giggly.

The only person I ever hurt was myself and even that I did to the minimum. If you can do that and you're still functioning, you're the luckiest person in the world.

Bogart could have been color blind. He got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.

To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.

I don't have many easy songs.

You don’t swing where you sleep.

Real success is not on the stage, but off the stage as a human being, and how you get along with your fellow man.

I've done some things I wish I could erase. . . . I invented mistakes. But the mistakes must be seen in context, and they must be weighed along with the positives.

Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz.

My home has always been show business.

If you want to be the best, baby, you've got to work harder than anybody else.

Most orgies that you go to, I have found, most of it is sad. All that wildness, all those laughs were like the shining silver and gold paper on packages, but there was nothing inside.

There are lines that I know are going to get a belly laugh, but after a few shows I get sick of hearing myself say them so I drop them.

The one thing you don't want is that stale sound when you've done a line so much you can't find a fresh approach to it. Drop it.

Being in public with May and the children was too heavy. I was irreversibly tuned in to everyone around us.

All I really had was my talent. Without that I wouldn't be welcome at the White House.

The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.

I wasn't anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

Wishing, hoping and regretting are the most common and dangerous tactics for evading the present.

My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

I'd learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.

Sinatra is the essence of vocal style. This man has an innate quality of knowing what is good musically. You can sum that up best by saying that he has musical integrity. Even when he does a bad song, there's a good quality in the presentation.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Elvis eleven.

Ten million dollars after I'd become a star I was deeply in debt.

Imitations only better the original.

I didn't hate being 60 as much as I had 50.

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.

In terms of addiction, there is nothing more powerful than men's toys.

Talk about handicap - I'm a one-eyed Negro Jew.

My mother was born in San Juan. So I'm Puerto Rican, Jewish, colored and married to a white woman. When I move into a neighborhood, people start running four ways at the same time.

Once I get outside my house in the morning, I'm on.

After I decided to become a Jew, only then did I learn that the Jews don't have all the money. When I found out Rockefeller and Ford were goyim, I almost resigned.