Sidney Poitier Quotes

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.

The cold hard fact of courage is that it has to spring from within. Because it's opposite, fear, lives inside of us as well...fear really is alive, even when it's just sitting there, free from its influence. Still we are aware how dangerous it is. How debilitating it is, how crippling and how it stops us some times.

"For somewhere in the back of my mind is that odd explanation that if you whisper a sentence in the ear of one person around a table of many - a short sentence such as "John slept close to a woman with whom he worked" - as those words go around the table, whispered to each person next to another, it might come out, less than a minute later, that John was a sleep-arounder, and he did it with every woman he knew; which meant he probably was gay, because he needed to give the impression of being a raging heterosexual.

Now, if that could happen in one minute, think of the long history of most faiths."

Stay from underfoot and don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?” “Yes, ma’am, I hear you.” Due to past experience, she may not have completely believed me.

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?

But listen, the day one decides to take the reins of one’s own life into one’s own hands,

Now more than ever, we must look to our artists to be our truthtellers and to challenge us toward creative solutions to the many problems mankind faces.

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.

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.

a man the South African government evidently thought too dangerous to be free, but also by then too prominent to be killed.

We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.

There is a sense of self, of character, and of personal self-worth and kindness and hopefulness and embrace that is characteristic of such people, educated and noneducated alike.

In Africa, there are still more men, if you’re looking for courage. There, a few years back, the colonial powers were the ones who owned the government, who owned the guns — the ones who were responsible for whether you ate, had a job, whether your children got an education, or whether you lived or died. But that colonial system was challenged by, in addition to Nelson Mandela, men like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and men in others places. They knew that the authorities would try to eliminate them.

They knew that they were there in the Bahamas because their forefathers had been captured and put on ships and transported to a different part of the world. They knew that those ancestors had a history and a culture, and they talked about that history and culture. Through oral history, they retained some of the fragments of who their great-great-grandfathers were, and probably even some surviving words of their language.

Even if you are someone used to wearing armor, guarded and afraid, I think love is such a strong force it would find a way through your protective guard. It will get to your heart, and you can’t put any fences around that. As much as you might try, you simply can’t. You’re going to have other forces that will be operative at the same time if it is right for you to fall in love with this activity or individual or cause or process.