Sidney Poitier Quotes

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.

You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were.

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.

I am what I have become

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.

The willingness to receive help and appreciate its value when it arrives, sometimes unannounced, is a subject that returns us to the question of why and how our lives turn out as they do.

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.

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 talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you.

"And nature doesn't tell you, "I'm going to have one of my guys tap you on the shoulder, and everything is going to be all right for the rest of the day.

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 in the survival kit for mankind. We hope for a little luck, we hope for a better tomorrow, we hope — although it is an impossible hope — to somehow get out of this world alive. And if we can't and don't, then it is enough to rejoice in our short time here and to remember how much we loved the view.

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.

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.

Now, I don’t think we are killing people because we’re any worse than anybody else or any better. I think that what we are doing is showing the darker side of what human beings have always been: we have a capacity for love, a capacity for kindness, a capacity for passion, and we have an equal capacity for their opposites. Love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, but love and hate have their opposites, and we have now a huge dilemma: we have the world’s number-one spot, we are the strongest military in the world, and we have more people hating us than ever before. I

I am the me I choose to be.

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