Poitier's Quotes

#1. I decided in my life that I would do nothing that did not reflect positively on my father's life. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#2. Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers. I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'Okay, I'll do that.' - Author: James Earl Jones

#3. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#4. Jackie Robinson is a true legend. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#5. Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson's. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#6. If you apologize because you are afraid, then you are a child not a man. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#7. So it's been kind of a long road, but it was a good journey altogether. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#8. But I always had the ability to say no. That's how I called my own shots. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#9. When I set out to become an actor, I had set myself a standard. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#10. My wife collects knickknacks. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#11. I lived in a country where I couldn't live where I wanted to live. I lived in a country where I couldn't go where I wanted to eat. I lived in a country where I couldn't get a job, except for those put aside for people of my colour or caste. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#12. As a man, I've been representative of the values I hold dear. And the values I hold dear are carryovers from the lives of my parents. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#13. My mother was the most amazing person. She taught me to be kind to other women. She believed in family. She was with my father from the first day they met. All that I am, she taught me. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#14. My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#15. As I entered this world, I would leave behind the nurturing of my family and my home, but in another sense I would take their protection with me. The lessons I had learned, the feelings of groundedness and belonging that have been woven into my character there, would be my companions on the journey. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#16. So much of life, it seems, is determined by pure randomness. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#17. I was playing this horrible part. I didn't didn't want to play it because the character was an awful racist. But I'm glad I did it because I met Sidney Poitier. - Author: Richard Widmark

#18. I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#19. I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant ... I had never been so described as Florida described me. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#20. You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#21. An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#22. I'll always be chasing you ... Glory. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#23. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#24. To be compared to Jackie Robinson is an enormous compliment, but I don't think it's necessarily deserved. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#25. A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#26. Since I couldn't actuate the things that I wanted to do, the only weapon I had was to say no. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#27. If the image one holds of one's self contains elements that don't square with reality, one is best advised to let go of them, however difficult that may be. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#28. Have you ever heard of 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?' I would like to play Sidney Poitier's role - I love that role. - Author: Keith Stanfield

#29. There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It's everywhere. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#30. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#31. I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations. - Author: David Steinberg

#32. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#33. So I had to be careful. I recognized the responsibility that, whether I liked it or not, I had to accept whatever the obligation was. That was to behave in a manner, to carry myself in such a professional way, as if there ever is a reflection, it's a positive one. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#34. Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#35. Racism is very painful. That's life. It never ends. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#36. We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#37. Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#38. My father was very big on marriage. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#39. I have a kind of respect
a worshipful attitude, even
for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons ... - Author: Sidney Poitier

#40. I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#41. When I was growing up, I didn't see me in the movies except in certain lesser roles. If it wasn't funny, I wasn't there. Then Sidney Poitier came along, and he wasn't funny. He was just good. There's me. So that was my pattern. - Author: Morgan Freeman

#42. I took one thing to heart that I heard from Sidney Poitier in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And it resonated so much with me. He says: 'Dad, you always looked at yourself as a black man. I look at myself as a man.' - Author: Dennis Haysbert

#43. Stay from underfoot and don't get into any trouble. You hear me?" "Yes, ma'am, I hear you." Due to past experience, she may not have completely believed me. When - Author: Sidney Poitier

#44. In America, it is difficult to be your own man. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#45. I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#46. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#47. I wanted to look at them because I feel, internally, that I am an ordinary person who has had an extraordinary life. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#48. I cannot be understood in three minutes. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#49. I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#50. I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#51. The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message - finally. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#52. Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they're not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier. - Author: Chadwick Boseman

#53. I'm not a library. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#54. A good deed here, a good deed there, a good thought here, a good comment there, all added up to my career in one way or another. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#55. Sydney Poitier, who said to Lester Maddox, Guess who's not coming to dinner? Never got a dinner! - Author: Red Buttons

#56. I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#57. I want people to say at the end of my day, you know, like I used to say about Sidney Poitier and James Cagney and Joan Crawford and Red Skelton and those guys and Bill Cosby. They did quality and substance. You always remember them. - Author: Bernie Mac

#58. My autobiography was simply the story of my life. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#59. I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#60. We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists ... in the loved one, perfection. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#61. Every film by Will Smith, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Don Cheadle will have great acting and carry good messages in the film. The films starring those actors are the films I tell young people to watch for good acting and to view for quality movies. - Author: Brian J. White

#62. I think the way I want to think. I live the way I want to live. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#63. So I'm OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#64. I am not a hugely religious person, but I believe that there is a oneness with everything. And because there is this oneness, it is possible that my mother is the principal reason for my life. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#65. I don't very often read novels. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#66. The trailblazers are my role models in this industry: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, and Billy Dee Williams. I keep their pictures in my trailer and try to measure to their standards every time I act. - Author: Brian J. White

#67. History passes the final judgment. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#68. My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#69. Sidney Poitier, who is class personified, said: 'Lou, you're a leading man because you're a good actor.' Brought tears to my eyes. - Author: Lou Diamond Phillips

#70. Our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want. - Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

#71. If I'm remembered for having done a few good things, and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#72. I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself - not me, but black people - that were uncomfortable. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#73. Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores. - Author: Quincy Jones

#74. I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#75. I come from a great family. I've seen family life and I know how wonderful, how nurturing, and how wonderful it can be. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#76. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#77. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#78. Every new fashion is a form of rebellion. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#79. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#80. Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#81. The journey has been incredible from its beginning. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#82. I am the me I choose to be. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#83. I was not the kind of a principal player that was so in demand that eight or 10 or 12 scripts came per month. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#84. To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#85. I became the storyteller of South Side Chicago. I used an old Kiwi liquid shoe polish as a microphone. I'd go around the house interviewing everybody, telling stupid jokes, doing voices. I mimicked Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., people on 'Laugh-In,' Flip Wilson. - Author: Bernie Mac

#86. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#87. The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees. - Author: Wesley Morris

#88. I wanted to explore the values that are at work, underpinning my life. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#89. controversial performance as a corrupt detective in Training Day - would be seen holding the Oscar for best actor, almost four decades after Poitier's - Author: Wil Haygood

#90. I find myself, at this time in my life, no less challenged, no less plagued, no less intrigued by what I still don't know. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#91. The older we get the less afraid we are. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#92. If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#93. I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#94. My father was a certain kind of man - I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father's name. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#95. 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. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#96. I had learned something of Miami from people who had visited there, so I knew what to expect. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#97. My father was the quintessential husband and dad. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#98. I get offered work these days. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#99. So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness. - Author: Sidney Poitier

#100. When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours. - Author: Sidney Poitier