Skip to content

Quotes from Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete — Jesse Owens

1913–1980

← All quotes by Jesse Owens

10 quotes

It's like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

We used to have a lot of fun. We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn't have steak? Who had steak?

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

We'd get into these little towns and tell 'em to get out the fastest guy in town and Jesse Owens would spot him ten yards and beat him.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere — one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

I decided I wasn't going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn't even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

She was unusual because even though I knew her family was as poor as ours, nothing she said or did seemed touched by that. Or by prejudice. Or by anything the world said or did. It was as if she had something inside her that somehow made all that not count.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers — weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside. There's where the power lies.

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jesse Owens (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.