Sidney Poitier

To be compared to Jackie Robinson is an enormous compliment, but I don't think it's necessarily deserved.

I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.

In my case, the body of work stands for itself... I think my work has been representative of me as a man.

I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself - not me, but black people - that were uncomfortable.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

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 shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

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.

Of all my father's teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain.

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