Sidney Poitier
Since I couldn't actuate the things that I wanted to do, the only weapon I had was to say no.
My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.
If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't.
In America, it is difficult to be your own man.
I had two roles for which I compromised.
I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.
My wife collects knickknacks.
I don't very often read novels.
I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.
Far as I can tell, I still have most of my hair, my gut is not hanging over my belt, and I still have all of my teeth.
I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me.
I get offered work these days.
I cannot be understood in three minutes.
I'm not a library.
An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return.
I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.
If the screen does not make room for me in the structure of their screenplay, I'll step out. I'll step back. I'd step back. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it.
I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant... I had never been so described as Florida described me.
I was a gift to my mother. She was a remarkable person. God or nature, or whatever those forces are, smiled on her, then passed me the best of her.
You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were.Collection: Better Than You
When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours.Collection: Pace
I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it.Collection: Inspirational
I am the me I choose to be.Collection: Life
We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.Collection: Struggle
A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.Collection: Persons
You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are.Collection: Better Than You
I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.Collection: Positive
Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.Collection: Selfish
Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?Collection: Children
I've learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger: it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage--self destructive, destroy the world rage--and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.Collection: Self
If you apologize because you are afraid, then you are a child not a man.Collection: Children
If I'm remembered for having done a few good things and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.Collection: Energy
Of all my father's teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain.Collection: Children
I defend myself by improving myself.Collection: Improving
I"ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me.Collection: I've Learned
Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real.Collection: Real
I think the way I want to think. I live the way I want to live.Collection: Thinking
Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.Collection: Powerful
But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don't have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more "authentic"-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that "other" world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I cameCollection: Views
I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.Collection: Years
As I've mentioned, a large part of my father's legacy is the lesson he taught his sons. He brought us together and said, 'The measure of a man is how well he provides for his children.Collection: Children
We suffer pain, we hang tight to hope, we nurture expectations, we are plagued occasionally by fears, we are haunted by defeats and unrealized hopes . . . The hoplessness of which I speak is not limited.Collection: Pain
If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things - you feel that after death, you will be no more.Collection: Oneness
I have a kind of respect - a worshipful attitude, even - for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons.Collection: Nature
Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.Collection: Nature
Okay listen, you think I'm so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value - to you I say, I'm not talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you.Collection: Thinking
True 'joy' is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating 'meaningful' pleasure.Collection: Meaningful
Racism is very painful. That's life. It never ends.Collection: Race