Sammy Davis, Jr. quotes
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“What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“If you want to be the best, baby, you've got to work harder than anybody else.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Real success is not on the stage, but off the stage as a human being, and how you get along with your fellow man.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Ten million dollars after I'd become a star I was deeply in debt.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I wasn't anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“A man is not complete until he has seen the baby he has made.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“If you want to get known as a singer you hire five sexy chicks and let them fight over you onstage and for the cameras. That's publicity, man.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“I've done some things I wish I could erase. . . . I invented mistakes. But the mistakes must be seen in context, and they must be weighed along with the positives.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Fame comes with its own standard. A guy who twitches his lips is just another guy with a lip twitch - unless he's Humphrey Bogart.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Wishing, hoping and regretting are the most common and dangerous tactics for evading the present.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“There are certain romances that belong in certain cities, in a certain atmosphere, in a certain time.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Once I get outside my house in the morning, I'm on.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“During three decades, along all the highways of my youth, Frank had always been there for me.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“The success of the Rat Pack or the Clan was due to the camaraderie, the three guys who work together and kid each other and love each other.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking,”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr.Source : "Sammy Davis Jr". The Oral Cancer Foundation, February 6, 2008.
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“After I decided to become a Jew, only then did I learn that the Jews don't have all the money. When I found out Rockefeller and Ford were goyim, I almost resigned.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Savor the moments that are warm and special and giggly.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“There's nothing that can match Broadway for stature and dignity.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“There are lines that I know are going to get a belly laugh, but after a few shows I get sick of hearing myself say them so I drop them.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“My home has always been show business.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“Most orgies that you go to, I have found, most of it is sad. All that wildness, all those laughs were like the shining silver and gold paper on packages, but there was nothing inside.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I didn't hate being 60 as much as I had 50.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr.Source : In Sammy Davis Jnr., J., and B. Boyar 'Yes I Can' (1965) pt. 3, ch. 23
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“May was young and beautiful, we were legally married, but she was caught in the prison of my skin.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Marilyn and I were rumored to be an item. We were friends. Nothing more. Marilyn was one of the sweetest creatures that ever lived.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I hadn't been in Vegas 20 minutes when I got word that the bookmakers were offering three to one that Frank wouldn't show for my wedding.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“I go to temple a lot less than I would like because when I do, people still look at me as if they think it's a publicity stunt.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I believed in Bobby Kennedy. Campaigning for him was an attempt to give back something to this country that has given me so much.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“When you lose a lover it's like getting a bad haircut. It grows back in time.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“With an ocean between you and your European friends, you have to keep them in your heart.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“I saw that my image was changing or fading. One of the reasons for taking a break from clubs was to be missed-not forgotten.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Part of show business is magic. You don't know how it happens.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Sober up, and you see and hear everything you'd been able to avoid hearing before.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“Though I love the luxury of the Waldorf Towers, room service there doesn't do soul food.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“We can't answer King's assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“The ultimate mystery is one's own self.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“When Liza Minelli was a child, she used to sit on my lap and call me Uncle Sammy.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I'd learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I had traveled 10 states and played over 50 cities by the time I was 4.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“Being in public with May and the children was too heavy. I was irreversibly tuned in to everyone around us.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Bogart could have been color blind. He got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“My handicap? Man, I am a one-eyed, black Jew! That's my handicap!”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“Talk about handicap! I'm a one-eyed Negro Jew.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Elvis eleven.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“I have a respect for Elvis and my friendship. It ain't my business what he did in private. The only thing I want to know is, 'Was he my friend?', 'Did I enjoy him as a performer?', 'Did he give the world of entertainment something?' - and the answer is YES on all accounts. The other jazz just don't matter.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“All I really had was my talent. Without that I wouldn't be welcome at the White House.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
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“You have to be able to look back at your life and say, "Yeah, that was fun."”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“The one thing you don't want is that stale sound when you've done a line so much you can't find a fresh approach to it. Drop it.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr. -
“The only person I ever hurt was myself and even that I did to the minimum. If you can do that and you're still functioning, you're the luckiest person in the world.”
-- Sammy Davis, Jr.
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