Quotes by Sidney Poitier

“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...”

“A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.”

“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 talki...”

“So much of life, it seems, is determined by pure randomness.”

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

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

“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 s...”

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

“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.”

“Like most people I am smarter than some, dumber than others, skinnier than most, and fatter than a few, but none was ever more confused than I was. I flew with confusion always parallel to me, and ...”

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

“The older we get the less afraid we are.”

“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 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.”

“When you’re addressing power, don’t expect it to crumble willingly. If you’re going to say, Hey now, look you guys, please look at what you did and look at yourselves and punish yourselves and at l...”

“A lot of black leaders, along with a lot of sympathetic white people, would say it’s too early in this country for forgiveness. We haven’t dealt with accountability yet, admission of guilt yet. And...”

“Compassion for other human beings has to extend to the society that’s been grinding the powerless under its heel. The more civilized the society becomes, the more humane it becomes; the more it can...”

“The great disease of mankind is ignorance. With knowledge you can grasp tight a belief: that you can be better, that the world can be better. With that, you can claim hope. Hope is the eternal tool...”