Sidney Poitier Quotations

My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.

I always wanted to be someone better the next day than I was the day before.

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.

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.

I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.

To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.

So it's been kind of a long road, but it was a good journey altogether.

Generally, I tend to despise human behavior rather than human creatures.

I have always been a learner because I knew nothing.

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

I decided in my life that I would do nothing that did not reflect positively on my father's life.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant... I had never been so described as Florida described me.

If I'm remembered for having done a few good things, and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.

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.

My autobiography was simply the story of my life.

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.

My father was the quintessential husband and dad.

But my dad also was a remarkable man, a good person, a principled individual, a man of integrity.

I come from a great family. I've seen family life and I know how wonderful, how nurturing, and how wonderful it can be.

There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It's everywhere.

I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.

I wanted to explore the values that are at work, underpinning my life.

I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was... a human being.

I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

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.

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.

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.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.

The journey has been incredible from its beginning.

If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't.

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.

I wanted to look at them because I feel, internally, that I am an ordinary person who has had an extraordinary life.

I was not the kind of a principal player that was so in demand that eight or 10 or 12 scripts came per month.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.

So I'm OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was.

I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.

An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return.

I had to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual fans. It was a terrific burden.

In my case, the body of work stands for itself... I think my work has been representative of me as a man.

Since I couldn't actuate the things that I wanted to do, the only weapon I had was to say no.

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 had two roles for which I compromised.

To be compared to Jackie Robinson is an enormous compliment, but I don't think it's necessarily deserved.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson's.

I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.

But I always had the ability to say no. That's how I called my own shots.

I had learned something of Miami from people who had visited there, so I knew what to expect.

I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me.

In America, it is difficult to be your own man.

When I set out to become an actor, I had set myself a standard.

My mother is a Bahamian. My father is a Bahamian, as am I, ... And all that I am, I've received from them and a country that has today given me the opportunities, and to my grandchildren, that I have never dreamt of.

Almost all the job opportunities were reflective of the stereotypical perception of blacks that had infected the whole consciousness of the country.

The next morning we came into the port at Miami. I saw the buildings. For me they were tall, tall buildings; there was nothing like them in Nassau.

I've had it all my life and when it can time for me to start a family, I was quite anxious to do so.

I learned quite quickly that there were places I couldn't go, that I would be questioned if I wandered into various neighborhoods.

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.

If you apologize because you are afraid, then you are a child not a man.

Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.

Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.

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 came

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.

Jackie Robinson is a true legend.

I'll always be chasing you... Glory.

History passes the final judgment

I have a kind of respect-- a worshipful attitude, even-- for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons...

Racism is very painful. That's life. It never ends.

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.

I don't very often read novels.

When you walk with someone, something unspoken happens. Either you match their pace or they match yours.

I'm going to quit writing.

My father was very big on marriage.

True 'joy' is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating 'meaningful' pleasure.

I defend myself by improving myself.

I cannot be understood in three minutes.

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.

Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real.

Every new fashion is a form of rebellion.

I"ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The older we get the less afraid we are.

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.

I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.

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.

If I'm remembered for having done a few good things and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.

You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are.

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?

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.