Quotes on Boxing

Eat your words! Eat your words! I am the greatest.

I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.

It is wonderful. It truly is. It is the only thing that is real! It's you against me, it's challenging another guy's manhood. With gloves. Words cannot describe that feeling of being a man, of being a gladiator, of being a warrior. It's irreplaceable.

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Some gems for the greatest of them all

It's hard to be humble, when you're as great as I am.

Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.

One minute I'm robbing a dope house. Next minute I'm the youngest heavyweight champion of the world. I'm only 20, 19, with a lot of money. Who am I? What am I? I don't even know who I am. I'm just a dumb child who's being abused and robbed by lawyers. I'm just a dumb pugnacious fool. I'm just a fool who thinks he's someone. Then you tell me I should be responsible.

Sonny Liston is nothing. The man can't talk. The man can't fight. The man needs talking lessons. The man needs boxing lessons. And since he's gonna fight me, he needs falling lessons.

I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man's-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.

When you can whip any man in the world, you never know peace.

My dad was in a hospital for months. The doctors told my dad he would never be able to walk again. My dad beat all the odds. He came back and was able to walk and start boxing again. He went to No. 1 in the world at welterweight to fight for the world title. But he never had his chance to fight for a world title.

I saw that streak in him when he told me, 'Get the hell out of here or I'll wipe you out., I got the hell out of there, Liston really scared me.

Boxing is a sport, but it's also entertainment. I wanted to transcend the sport and be considered just not as a fighter, or a champion, but someone very special.

Will be a divine fight, a holy war...Armageddon on a miniature scale.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn't want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn't understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.

There are more pleasant things to do than beat up people.

I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I'm in a world of my own.

I'm the best. I just haven't played yet.

If they can make penicillin out of mouldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.