Sidney Poitier Quotes

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.

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

As a chief justice of the United States once said, blacks were three-fifths of a human, and only a full human being should have rights, the implication being that three-fifths of a human being was something fit to function only as a beast of burden. Well, that is a distortion exposing the enemies of logic and reason, and among them are mass hysteria, hate, prejudice, and ignorance.

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.

my mother chose to teach me that sometimes gratification has to be delayed.

How we see ourselves, how we see each other,” she said, “should be determined by us and not by people who generally don’t like us; people who pass laws certifying us as less than human. Too many of us see each other as ‘they’ see us,” she continued. “Time for that shit to stop. We’re going to have to decide for ourselves what we are and what we’re not. Create our own image of ourselves. And nurture it and feed it till it can stand on its own.

I was still unable to reconcile the uncontrollable passions of “want” and the unmovable insistence of “need” as they battled relentlessly over possession of my meager resources, with “want” winning out over “need” far more frequently than it should have.

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 am the me I choose to be.

Your home is here. And your home is endangered. Consequently, so are you. Without this home, you or perhaps your children or grandchildren will die. Clearly, your destiny now rests in your own hands. But as Franklyn and Montaro have both told you, the seeds of a solution are already in your hands. The longer you do not act, the weaker the better self in each of you becomes, and the harder your struggle grows against the relentless pulls of greed, selfishness, and the addictive lust for power, which breeds wars and indifference to the sufferings of fellow human beings.

And though she was devout in her faith, she wasn’t married to church doctrine, nor do I think that she actually recognized the fundamental differences between Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, and how the division came about. I don’t think she was aware that the king of England wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and the Roman Catholic Church would not give him permission to get rid of his wife to do that. So he set up his own Anglican Catholicism. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know because my mother was not that versed a person. In fact, that was history I wouldn’t know much about until many years later.

As I've mentioned, a large part of my father's legacy is the lesson he taught his sons. He brought us together and said, 'The measure of a man is how well he provides for his children.

Greed and cruelty are pretty widely distributed throughout humanity, as are their victims.

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.

"But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don't have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more "authentic"-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that "other" world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came"