Jesse Owens

In America, anyone can become somebody.

Jesse Owens

Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.

Jesse Owens

People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you. The lives of most men are patchwork quilts. Or at best one matching outfit with a closet and a laundry bag full of incongruous accumulations. A lifetime of training for just 10 seconds.

Jesse Owens

The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.

Jesse Owens

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.

Jesse Owens

People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you.

Jesse Owens

After I came home from the 1936 olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job.

Jesse Owens

Although I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.

Jesse Owens

Every morning, just like in Alabama, I got up with the sun, ate my breakfast even before my mother and sisters and brothers, and went to school, winter, spring, and fall alike to run and jump and bend my body this way and that for Mr. Charles Riley.

Jesse Owens

For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.

Jesse Owens