"Are you genuine? Or just an actor?..." - Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

“At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.”

“To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.”

“People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.”

“I'm definitely gonna be the People's champion ... but I just ain't gonna be the champ the way you want me to be the champ. I'm gonna be the champ the way I wanna be.”

“For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”

“We have hearts within, Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts.”

“The more people I meet, the more cultures I start to embrace, the more people I open myself up to - it's a growing process I'm excited about. But it's also a challenge for me, to be at this level and still be able to connect with somebody who's living that everyday life. At first it was something I struggled with, because everything was moving so fast. I didn't know how to digest it. The best thing I did was go back to the city of Compton, to touch the people who I grew up with and tell them the stories of the people I met around the world.”

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.”

“There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.”