Butkus Quotes

#1. Coming up as a kid, I played middle linebacker and I was very bow-legged, and I wanted to be like the legendary Dick Butkus.

Earl Campbell

#2. I want to be recognized as the best-no doubt about it. When they say all-pro middle linebacker, I want them to mean Butkus!

Dick Butkus

#3. I'm not so mean. I wouldn't ever go out to hurt anybody deliberately - unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.

Dick Butkus

#4. If we're not on them, they go back to their old ways.

Dick Butkus

#5. 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.

Dick Butkus

#6. The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#7. Few people get to earn a living at what they like to do and there are hazards in any profession. Football is something I was made for. I gave the game all I could for as long as I could. I guess my only regret was that my career was too short.

Dick Butkus

#8. If I were young, fast, healthy, and had a lot of money and my whole sex life ahead of me, I'd retire - like Secretariat.

Dick Butkus

#9. The real reason for coming to Montour is my love and respect for football.

Dick Butkus

#10. My thing is trying to convince them they can win.

Dick Butkus

#11. Some parents were nervous about how they would portray everything, ... At a picnic the moms put on for the team and coaches, I said that all the reality shows are turning around and showing good things, not bad things.

Dick Butkus

#12. We're a big check mark on everybody's schedule. I told them it's just another challenge, let's go after it.

Dick Butkus

#13. Anything that happens that's good, they think, Oh, it's an accident, when is the roof caving in? You've got to get them out of that mental framework.

Dick Butkus

#14. If I was smart enough to be a doctor, I'd be a doctor. I ain't, so I'm a football player.

Dick Butkus

#15. I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

Seamus Heaney

#16. History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.

Walter Benjamin

#17. I worked hard at becoming a professional football player, just like society says you should. It said you had to be fierce. I was fierce. Tough. I was tough.

Dick Butkus

#18. I prefer them broken.'
'Why is that?' Victor said.
Dor looked at the grain of sand in his fingers.
'Because I am the sinner who created them.

Mitch Albom

#19. For the space of half a year, the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it.

Emily Bronte