Sports Athletes Quotes

#1. I am so grateful to everybody that supports the Sheckler Foundation, and gives us the ability to continue to help kids and injured action sports athletes.

Ryan Sheckler

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

Daniel Tosh

#3. Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.

Phil Knight

#4. What if you didn't have education for sports? People with a natural inclination for sports, athletes without any kind of education, without any kind of training, they would just be couch athletes instead of the world class Olympians that we have.

Sondra Radvanovsky

#5. I think when young kids can see Jason Collins, myself and Michael Sam, and Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe and different athletes come out, it will definitely change and encourage younger gay men and women to play the sport.

Robbie Rogers

#6. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Pitchers, golfers, goalkeepers, they mutter to themselves, but tennis players talk to themselves-and answer. Tennis players look like lunatics in a public square.

Andre Agassi

#7. The sad thing is that I know no athletes' names. I am not a sports girl at all.

Clara Mamet

#8. The families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.

Jeffrey Kluger

#9. As athletes, we're used to reacting quickly. Here, it's 'come, stop, come, stop.' There's a lot of downtime. That's the toughest part of the day.

Michael Jordan

#10. The mind is absolutely instrumental in achieving results, even for athletes. Sports psychology is a very small part, but it's extremely important when you're winning and losing races by hundredths and even thousandths of a second.

Michael Johnson

#11. My overwhelming concern will always be the well-being of the athletes. In Olympic sport, it is rare for competitors not to devote half their young life to this. Their families will have given up all sorts of things to allow them to do that.

Sebastian Coe

#12. Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?

Malcolm Gladwell

#13. Athletes have a certain stubbornness that carries us through and makes us do things that people say we can't do.

Kim Clijsters

#14. I try to help my athletes visualize their full potential, and then get out of the way as they achieve it.

Pat Roberts

#15. Dance is certainly a sport, and they are phenomenal athletes, and they're also artists.

Neve Campbell

#16. Definitely, injuries are tough, and they happen to every athlete in every sport. The best athletes put it behind them and keep pushing forward. I haven't really had a choice; I've had so many injuries. And the love of BMX, I haven't wanted to stop no matter what.

Tory Nyhaug

#17. You must allow your players to become the athletes they can be. Don't make them into anything just to become the kind of winners fans, friends and others think they must be.

John Kessel

#18. I think today's athletes generally are spoiled by what's happened to salaries, but I also think that golfers have maintained the best demeanor of any sport.

Arnold Palmer

#19. Looking good is important. We're our own premium brand as professional athletes, so you want to be thoughtful about presentation and represent yourself and your city and sport as best you can.

C. J. Wilson

#20. 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.

Jerry West

#21. We didn't call it a sport necessarily, and skaters definitely weren't thought of as athletes, we were thought of as misfits.

Mike Vallely

#22. It's important that athletes can compete on a level playing field. And youngsters coming into the sport can know that if they are working hard and training hard, they'll see a true reflection of where they stand and what they can achieve worldwide and not be swayed by people who are cheating.

Paula Radcliffe

#23. Athletes are born winners, there not born loosers, and the sooner you understand this, the faster you can take on a winning attitude and become sucessful in life.

Charles R. Sledge Jr.

#24. Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?

Joyce Carol Oates

#25. No matter how little we think anatomy should matter to one's social and political rights, surely we can't pretend biology doesn't matter in sports. Surely there's a reason we don't let adults play in the t-ball leagues, and a reason most women athletes want their own leagues.

Alice Dreger

#26. Think of all the girls who could become top athletes but quit sports because they're afraid of having too many defined muscles and being made fun of or called unattractive.

Serena Williams

#27. There is only a relationship between music and sports because all athletes want to be rappers and all rappers want to be athletes.

Dwyane Wade

#28. In the seventies we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it okay for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.

Billie Jean King

#29. My favorite thing about being linked to Oakley is getting to hang with the cool people, the cool athletes - like the X-Games guys. Those guys play sports where they can really hurt themselves, and, well, I just play golf. I'm like the wimpy guy over here.

Bubba Watson

#30. In wheelchair sports, people thought athletes with disabilities were courageous and inspirational. They never give them credit for simply being competitive.

Jean Driscoll

#31. Athletes are American princes and the locker room is their castle. Some of them behave in princely fashion, become legitimate heroes to us all. And some are jerks.

Anna Quindlen

#32. Athletics is a great sport with many different events and athletes come in all shapes and sizes. I'm one of the smallest athletes on the track. They call me the 'pocket rocket'.

Jenny Meadows

#33. To me, doing the Olympics in 1992 in Barcelona for NBC, just seeing the Dream Team take the floor, was a thrill for me. I don't think there was another team in any sport with that high level of athletes playing together.

Marv Albert

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

John Roderick

#35. The London Games will be designed for the athletes and we will provide them with the very best venues and the very best conditions to pursue their sporting dreams in London.

Sebastian Coe

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

Jozy Altidore

#37. I've dated athletes before but it's too tough because we have the same job, we deal with the same problems and both do a very selfish sport.

Tyson Gay

#38. I long for the days when athletes were revered. I want to see the romance return to sports, to see people enjoy the game purely for the game and the players.

Mike Piazza

#39. Jeremy Lin is the only Asian American in the NBA today and one of the few in any professional U.S. sport. His arrival is surely leading other talented Asian American athletes this week to contemplate a pro career.

Eric Liu

#40. When you see athletes like me win gold medals, you only see the finished product, you dont see the real effort that the likes of Ron have put into making that product. Without the Ron Roddans of this world, you would have no sport.

Linford Christie

#41. Sports in Indonesia aren't being supported by the government. The rewards you get as a young player don't match the effort you put in. I want to be different from other athletes, if not better, and I want to make something good out of my profile and help the younger players have opportunities.

Taufik Hidayat

#42. I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.

Colson Whitehead

#43. Men sometimes seem more ready to accept women as brain surgeons than as athletes.

Janice Kaplan

#44. At the end of the day, everything is God's plan, and he cares about what we do. He cares about our hearts, how we play the game, and how we treat people. He's definitely involved with how we handle sports and not just the outcome of it. I'm proud when athletes mention God in any way.

Tim Tebow

#45. All the athletes are individuals. This isn't a team sport. We all have our own styles, our own clothing preferences and our own way of doing things. That's the way I do things and I'm proud of it.

Nick Goepper

#46. To achieve in sports you first have to have a dream, and then you must act on that dream. The best athletes are those who truly enjoy what they are doing and display a tremendous amount of work ethic. They continue to persevere in spite of setbacks and never lose sight of their ultimate goal.

Dianne Holum

#47. I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of 'student-athletes.' I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don't believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that's another story.

Susan Orlean

#48. It's interesting. I've known quite a few good athletes that can't begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up.

Neil Peart

#49. I'm in the perfect position. It's a sports position and a political position where I can help better the lives of athletes around the world.

Angela Ruggiero

#50. I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

Timothy Ferriss

#51. You'd like more people to recognise what you do is special. But I take the attitude that the best thing I can do for my sport is to be the best at it. The best way people will come to recognise that track and field is a great sport is to see athletes excelling at it.

Maurice Greene

#52. A lot of athletes use sports psychologists.

Andy Murray

#53. Golf has humbled, humiliated, and just about licked all the great athletes who tried it.

Earl Blaik

#54. The value of the sport and the value of sports in general, with the life lessons, the ups and downs. The depth of the life experience, what athletes are actually offering to us when they come out and play, if you look at a season and go moment by moment.

Willi Smith

#55. On today's athletes: I wish I could turn back the clock a little bit so I'd have a chance to cut it up with those guys.

Eric Heiden

#56. By continually increasing the difficulty of the sport, we are discouraging younger athletes from starting and continuing in the sport. But most importantly, we are losing the beauty of our sport. We do not want gymnastics to lose what makes it so great - its artistic beauty.

Svetlana Boginskaya

#57. The team with the best athletes doesn't usually win. It's the team with the athletes who play best together.

Lisa Fernandez

#58. To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

Sam Harris

#59. When I was younger I only read sports books. I loved the biographies that told how athletes developed. When I got into coaching, I did start to read more instructional books, but I was always more interested in the people behind the ideas.

Tony Dungy

#60. 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.

Venus Williams

#61. We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.

Pat Conroy

#62. People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don't like change. A bunch of people don't like the Olympics now because we've added skateboarding ... We're modernizing the sport.

Larry Ellison

#63. After I suffered a labral tear in my hip while playing soccer, I realized that many sports-related injuries can be prevented and I dedicated myself to helping young athletes learn more about injury prevention.

Cobi Jones

#64. The problem with many athletes is they take themselves seriously and their sport lightly.

Michael Waltrip

#65. Female athletes are stereotyped by the general population
and usually as homosexuals.

Billie Jean King

#66. If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's "The Sports Gene" it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers.

Malcolm Gladwell

#67. I squirm when I see athletes praying before a game. Don't they realize that if God took sports seriously he never would have created George Steinbrenner.

Mark Russell

#68. It was the Michael Jordan/Nike phenomenon that really let people see that athletes were OK, and black athletes were OK. Defying a previous wisdom - not only that black athletes wouldn't sell in white America, but that the NBA as a predominantly black sport could not sell in white America.

David Stern

#69. Not many countries establish a prize for peace. The Seoul Peace Prize has its roots in the 1988 Summer Olympics when this country opened its doors to people and athletes from more than 160 countries. Korea did so in part because it believes in the power of sports for peace and development.

Ban Ki-moon

#70. Climbing is one of the few sports in which the arena (the cliffs, the mountains and their specific routes) acquire a notoriety that outpopulates, outshines and outlives the actual athletes.

Jonathan Waterman

#71. Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can't become athletes. We're watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

Kevin Hart

#72. The reports of racial episodes are disturbing. But the players' protest is exhilarating because it is the most high-profile example to date in a continuing revolution in which the athletes who drive the multibillion-dollar college sports machine have begun to use their visibility to demand change.

William C. Rhoden

#73. I don't see many people as heroes and, though I love sport, I believe athletes rarely deserve that praise.

Giles Duley

#74. If athletes could think of SM as sports, they'd understand the acceptance of pain, but they'd always want to know who was winning.

Joseph W. Bean

#75. I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.

Bill James

#76. These days the temptation to use steroids in sports has become too great for many young athletes.

Jim Sensenbrenner

#77. My kids are good athletes and runners. They run in a bunch of sports.

Scott Bakula

#78. The problem is not with the athletes, but with us. No matter how blatant the drug use may be, we don't stop watching the Tour de France. Maybe we should just turn off the television and get on our own bikes.

Peter Singer

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

Bill Bradley

#80. Zen students see themselves as athletes. Their competitive sport is enlightenment; only with enlightenment do we compete.

Frederick Lenz

#81. I think exercise tests us in so many ways, our skills, our hearts, our ability to bounce back after setbacks. This is the inner beauty of sports and competition, and it can serve us all well as adult athletes.

Peggy Fleming

#82. Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.

Anita Desai

#83. What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way.

Naveen Jain

#84. I like Barack Obama as a person. He's articulate, he knows sports, his brother-in-law's a coach. He always has the athletes to the White House. But I don't know about some of his policies and some of these people in Congress.

Pete Rose

#85. The things that people do now in sports, you can't even believe. These are complete total athletes. To see what human beings can do in the highest level is amazing.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#86. That's the hard part about sport: as men we haven't started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.

Boris Becker

#87. I had a great interest in sports. I had three older brothers who were great athletes. I was not.

George J. Mitchell

#88. In skating or any amateur sport, as athletes we share something in common: the cost of training is quite a burden on our parents or on the athletes themselves trying to find a way to pay for their costs.

Patrick Chan

#89. 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.

Lou Holtz

#90. Sporting success doesn't happen by accident. It takes hard work and determination on the part of the individual athletes. And it also takes investment in facilities and training support.

Nicola Sturgeon

#91. Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate success for an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Sports shoes don't win races. Athletes do.

Felix Dennis

#92. It is to create the best Games the world has ever seen by unlocking the UK's unrivalled passion for sport, by delivering the best Games for athletes to compete in, by showcasing London's unmatched cultural wealth and diversity and by creating a real and lasting legacy.

Sebastian Coe

#93. 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.

Bill Maher

#94. With athletes, it's never fully understood the level to which we push ourselves. Especially in an endurance sport.

Clara Hughes

#95. It takes patience to become the best runner you can be. Top athletes realize that running is a long-term sport. It is set up for people who value delayed gratification and who like hard-earned success.

Anthony Famiglietti

#96. We might not make what athletes in other sports make, but we have greater longevity and we do have certain freedoms to do things they can't do. Like stay home one week and play the next week.

David Duval

#97. One of the things I love within music and within sports is how often musicians and athletes thank their audience. In the art world, you would never hear that.

Eric Fischl

#98. The sports space is so full of opinion that you aren't hearing from the athletes just speaking for themselves. We are such a Twitter-oriented society with radio talk shows, TV talk shows and social media - what you are missing is the authentic, unfiltered aspect of who these people are.

Hannah Storm

#99. Cycling is a sport of amazing athletes. Its been a privilege and a honor for me to be in this sport and to have a chance to race at the highest level.

Robin Farina

#100. There's just so much negative media surrounding professional athletes or sports in general, whether it's kids that are pressured too much or professional athletes making mistakes that influence their family.

Kristopher Belman