Quotes About Athletes

O.J. Simpson was primarily interested in O.J. His rise to fame in the late '60s coincided with the period where black athletes were more outspoken and political than in any era. You're talking about the generation of black athletes that came about after Jackie Robinson. Athletes after that were just happy to find a place in sports. But when you got to the mid-'60s, you had athletes like Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, who were very outspoken on the issues of race and civil rights.

Good athletes do not know what tiredness is. They do not know what discouragement is. Good athletes only know what victory is.

If the Palestinian Olympic Committee or Palestinian Federation provide good facilities to the athletes then maybe I can become better than these Bahraini or Qatari athletes.

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.

I don't need to scare the other athletes. When I'm running, I will scare them.

The attention I get has been great. It has opened so many doors for me. It's nice that people are accepting beautiful women as athletes. It's encouraging to girls that muscles don't mean you can't be beautiful.

Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

I don't see myself as disabled. There's nothing I can't do that able-bodied athletes can do.

I personally believe that professional athletes should give back to their communities in any way possible. We are in a position to make a difference.

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.

Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

The thing that concerns me the most is when I hear that people are making a lot of money a lot of ways except for the athletes, whether it's on the bowl games, the TV contracts, the conferences, the schools, the coaches, however you want to say it.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they'd be, what position they'd play and so on.

We professional athletes are very lucky. Unlike most mortals, we are given the privilege of dying twice - once when we retire and again when death takes us.

Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up.

You learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.

There is still an assumption among many people that to be black is to be lower class. In the last fifteen to twenty years, perhaps even further back than that, there's also been an explosion of a very wealthy black class in the United States, but those people are often treated as special cases: they're athletes, entertainers. Jay-Z. Basketball players. The country metabolizes the fact these rich black people exist, but it seems only to reinforce the idea that every other black person is limping along in poverty.

Often when people are claiming that they are not creative, they mean that they are not artists, writers, athletes, or any other media types demonstrating creativity. Or they know someone who always seems to have a lot of ideas and know that they can't match that. We all have a tendency to idolize those who create what we see in the media. I think it's better to use these people as models rather than idols, especially when these people have aspects of their lives that are similar to us. Then we can take their inspiration as we go on to be creative in our own way in our own lives.

Unfortunately the world is what it is now. People don't get along for whatever reason. As professional athletes, in a way we're almost ambassadors for peace, because sports brings everyone together.

To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It's great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don't believe that.

American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive.

Boxing is a glorious sport to watch and boxers are incredible, heroic athletes, but it's also, to be honest, a stupid game to play. Even the winners can end up with crippling brain damage. In a lot of ways, hustling is the same. But you learn something special from playing the most difficult games, the games where winning is close to impossible and losing is catastrophic: You learn how to compete as if your life depended on it. That's the lesson I brought with me to the so-called "legitimate" world.

The bottom line is that these athletes tend to be safer investments because they really value their marketing opportunities. They don't make as much money as during their active careers.

As inherently franchise-altering as drafts are, as monumental as they can be in the sport's history, you still can't get past the fact that this is several hours of people wearing suits and reading names off a sheet of paper. The athletes' clothes are entertaining - though not as much as they once were - and there's a warmth you get from watching young men and their families have their dreams come true. But it's still just a televised committee meeting.

I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.

I'm sick of the media making female sports athletes into supermodels, when they're clearly sixes at best.

The best athletes in any sport take stretching very seriously before and after matches. Stretching is instrumental in any athlete's physical success.

I've witnessed thousands of superior athletes try to becomes hitters and fail at it.

My job is to teach them to believe they could perform better than they realize. Great coaches teach athletes to go beyond the barriers.

Experiencing this pain in my muscles and aching and going on and on is my challenge. The last three or four reps is what makes the muscles grow. This area of pain divides a champion from someone who is not a champion. That's what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they'll go through the pain no matter what happens. I have no fear of fainting. I do squats until I fall over and pass out. So what? It's not going to kill me. I wake up five minutes later and I'm OK. A lot of other athletes are afraid of this. So they don't pass out. They don't go on.

Some people are guilty when they win. Some people, "Ah, you know, it's so unfortunate, some people had to lose." I mean, even some modern-day competitors, athletes have a guilt complex about winning. They think it isn't fair. That's not how you win. You don't feel guilty when you wine, and you don't feel sorry for anybody about it.

Professional football's a tough game. It's a lot of contact. It's a lot of wear and tear on your body. You've got elite athletes running into each other, play after play, at high speeds. And this is something that I love and I enjoy.

So far China has won the most gold medals, ladies and gentlemen. The Chinese athletes can't wait to get home and show the medals off to the kids who made them.

When you're young, you develop ways to win, and you think they will always work, but then you get to the top, competing against the other top athletes, and sometimes things don't work.

I get a lot of parents coming up to me, telling me they are grooming their kids to be professional athletes. I'm really against that. I think it's a great life, and yeah, you can lead them in that direction. I think a lot of parents live their lives through the kids. Because they didn't make it, they want their kids to make it. It puts a lot of undue pressure on the kids.

A lot of the athletes moved away from boxing, into UFC - which I think is really crazy, where they elbow to the head and knee to the jaw. I think that's really a barbaric sport - but boxing is coming back.

Female athletes are supposed to be toned down. You're always supposed to talk about the team and never stand out.

Some kids, for some reason, it just doesn't click in the classroom as they need it to. We have college coaches talk to them, former high school athletes, motivational speakers, teachers, principals.

There are things about some professional athletes that I cannot stand-the pretense, the egos, the pomposity, the greed.

I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.

Stop saying athletes do it for the love of the game. They do it for the love of their 32-room mansion with the live shark tank in the living room. If pro sports paid minimum wage, Shaquille O'Neal would be a bouncer at Scores, and Anna Kournikova would be a mail-order bride from Minsk.

It's not my place to tell you whom to vote for, to take any political stand, to tell you what religion to believe in. I'm an athlete. I can influence certain things, but when I see other athletes and celebrities telling you whom to vote for, I actually get a bit offended.

One of the common traits of outstanding performers-coaches, athletes, managers, sales representatives, executives, and others who face a daily up/down, win/lose accounting system-is that a rejection, that is, defeat, is quickly forgotten, replaced eagerly by pursuit of a new order, client, or opponent.

The beauty of all these years of singing the anthem is that I got a chance to meet athletes that I love, and there was a mutual respect.

When someone is in a state of flow, that person's brain is not thinking about anything - it's just processing things through chunks at a total instinct level. Athletes in a state of flow describe knowing what will happen just before it does - knowing how a defender will react to a certain move an instant before doing it. Of course, if you know what will happen, you can succeed at doing it, so an athlete in flow has a stand-out game.

Having a home away from the media glare is important to world-class athletes.

You can kick a ball into the net, throw a basketball into the net. Tennis is complicated. It'll make a lot of great athletes run the other way because they can't be successful initially.

You can exercise vigorously and eat junk and get by. But you can't eat perfectly and not exercise. Look at many athletes today; they are human garbage cans. They eat anything, but they exercise so hard they burn it up. But why not exercise and put the right fuel in too?