African Americans

"It takes a lot to become a champion. You need to be a killer. If you can't look over that net and see Public Enemy Number One, then you aren't going to be a champ.""

"She is one of the greatest players who ever lived. . . Martina couldn't touch her. I think she'd beat the Williams sisters."

"Suddenly it dawned on me that my triumphs had not destroyed the racial barriers once and for all, as I had—perhaps naively—hoped. Or if I did destroy them, they had been erected behind me again."

"Is that all I did?...Hit batters? Is that really all they remember?...I wasn’t trying to intimidate anybody — are you kidding me? I was just trying to survive, man."

"I wasn’t mean. I don’t buy into any of it. You hear people talk about this glare that I had. You know, I’ve been wearing glasses for almost 60 years. I wasn’t glaring...I just couldn’t see the catcher’s signals. I was just trying to see. That’s all. But people turn everything into something else."

"People don’t know what it was like to be a young black pitcher in those days."

"I've played a couple of hundred games of tic-tac-toe with my little daughter and she hasn't beaten me yet. I've always had to win. I've got to win."

"People make it sound like it was easy, like all I had to do was stare at a hitter or throw inside and they’d wilt. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t easy. There wasn’t anything easy about it."

"I’m proud of that fact that whatever I did, I did it my way."

"Hank Aaron could hit God’s fastball."

"I guess I was never much in awe of anybody. I think you have to have that attitude if you're going to go far in this game."

"Robert, the scales must be balanced no matter how long it takes."

"Bob wasn’t unfriendly when he was playing. I’d say it was more like hateful."

"In a world filled with hate, prejudice and protest, I find that I too am filled with hate, prejudice and protest. I hate phonies. I am prejudiced against all those who have contempt for me because my face is black and all those who accept me only because of my ability to throw a baseball. I am not proud of that ability. It is not something I earned or acquired or bought. It is a gift."

"Gibson was so mean, he’d knock you down and then meet you at home plate to see if you wanted to make something of it."

"Being the Queen of Tennis is all well and good, but you can't eat a crown. Nor can you send the Internal Revenue Service a throne clipped to their tax forms...I reign over an empty bank account, and I'm not going to fill it by playing amateur tennis."

"He hated everyone. He even hated Santa Claus."

"When a hitter like Pete LaCock hits a grand slam off you, it’s time to hang them up."

"The only people I ever felt intimidated by in my whole life were Bob Gibson and my daddy."

"I remember one time going out to the mound to talk with Bob Gibson. He told me to get back behind the plate where I belonged and that the only thing I knew about pitching was that I couldn’t hit it."

"Don’t dig in against Gibson, he’ll knock you down. He’d knock down his own grandmother. Don’t stare at him. Don’t smile at him. Don’t talk to him. He doesn’t like it. If you happen to hit a home run, don’t run too slow and don’t run too fast. And if he hits you, don’t charge the mound. He’s a Golden Glove boxer."

"Bob Gibson is the luckiest pitcher in baseball. He is always pitching when the other team doesn't score any runs."

"Children whose fathers are not old enough to have seen him pitch, still come up to Gibson to say he’s their favorite pitcher, not because of his 3,117 career strikeouts or his 1.12 ERA in 1968 or his unrelenting brilliance in the World Series. No, it’s because he was mean, tough, a symbol of badass."

"If I hadn't gone through certain things, and because I had those six months or whatever -- just a lot of quiet time -- if I hadn't gone through it, I don't know if I would ever have that much time to reflect. A lot of people don't."

""My story is unique, in that the first part of my life, my journey, I hit the pinnacle of my career, and it was a very public career, and then I made decisions that cost me all of that"."

""The weight and the baggage of many years of knowing that. I’ve been blessed with a super amount of talent but I could not go on any more with this baggage, lying to the world, lying to God"."

""I still struggle with knowing that I let a lot of people down. I disappointed a lot of people that love and care for me, worldwide, and when I think about that it kind of gives me the motivation to kind of keep going on"."

""By helping people, it's a form of healing for myself, because I hurt so many people. I know that"."

""You can remember me winning races, winning medals, breaking records -- but how, then, is that going to help you in your day-to-day life?"."

""I surely wish that I could go back and change certain things in my past, on one hand, but then I wouldn't be who I am today, someone who I'm actually really proud of"."

""I want people to understand everybody makes mistakes … I truly think a person’s character is determined by their admission of their mistakes and beyond that what they do about it … It’s really about looking forward, looking to the future, how can I make this wrong a right"."

""I realized that people might not forgive me but that God forgives, and if He can forgive me I can forgive myself and I will be okay"."

""I made a mistake. I made the choice to, at that time, protect myself, to protect my family, and I’ve paid the consequences dearly"."

"I must, I can, I will provide the physical evidence of my and my family’s having lived upon this Earth, this planet. In the great scheme of things, it is less than a drop in the bucket, but it pleases me to be able to leave this evidence here for a time."

"It is often felt that the lyric or romantic sensibility cannot express itself in iron. The intent of a good deal of my work is to demonstrate that it is a possibility no more foreign to iron than to marble."

"Trees have long been my metaphor, symbolic of my inner and outer growth—the taproot delving deep into my conscious and subconscious, the origins of my art, life, and family; peripheral roots branching out into other communities, cultures, a cosmos of interweaving inter- actions; a trunk and branches reaching up and out beyond their tips, leaves, fruit, falling here and there."

"The possibilities of developing the sense of movement in a sculpture are inherent in the material and in the technique, that is to say, forming, bending, stretching, cutting, and twisting metal parts. I like to suggest movement or give an impression of movement."

"My sculpture begins and ends with what can be done with metal. Between the beginning and end are other considerations. The drama of the process of each weld involves a change of state from solid to liquid and back to solid. Repetitions of this process bring about construction, a new constellation of the real and the imagined, ruminations in metal. The material basis of my sculpture is metallic opportunities. Bringing pressure to the right points, I draw the aesthetic out of the industrial process. To me, metal is alive. The forms tell their own story—how they resisted the torch and hammer. From the mill through the studio to the gallery, park, or plaza, the sculptor’s challenge is to bend the metal to his wishes, hammer it into his vision."

"I like working with my hands, making things and holding things. As a sculptor, I talk about using your head, your heart, and your hands— you think about things, you feel things, and then you use your hands to try to represent what that is, in some material."

"I am a Chicago artist because I am from this city; I’m a Black artist because I happen to be Black. These descriptions are sometimes useful to other people. But I’m also many other things—a man, a human being, an artist. Artists have a unique opportunity to make a difference . . . to look and work toward the future. Most people, by the nature of their work, have to think about what’s happening now, to serve as kind of custodians of our culture; but artists have the opportunity and responsibility to be forward-looking. We have the job of creating new ideas and visions for the future, and I’m pleased to be a part of that."

"I came to see the strength of my own roots and past. The success of the early phase of the civil rights movement, which resulted in voting rights legislation and the breaking down of obvious barriers like segregated drinking fountains and public accommodations, gave one a sense of being able to prevail. What happened after that was chastening, tempering. Another thing, too, is to discover the obvious—that the foundations of American society were built upon the backs of our forefathers."

"My own use of winged forms in the early ’50s is based on mythological themes, like Icarus and Winged Victory. It’s about, on the one hand, trying to achieve victory or freedom internally. It’s also about investigating ideas of personal and collective freedom. My use of these forms has roots and resonances in the African-American experience and is also a universal symbol. People have always seen birds flying and wished they could fly."

"I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels: political freedom, freedom to think and to feel. As an African American living in the United States, obviously issues like segregation laws, the civil rights movement in the 1960s or South Africa have been on my mind when I have dealt with the concept of freedom. But freedom also relates to my career as an artist: freedom of mind, thought and imagination. On the artistic level, freedom was a significant principle in the earlier art movements, such as Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism. More recently, public art focuses on the issue of universal freedom."

"To be creative is to not know what one is doing. The process of creation resolves the imbalance or irritation that initiated the desire to create something. Sculpture is a way of exploring, amplifying, and giving form to my enthusiasms, which are wide-ranging and often intersect each other, technically, emotionally, and spiritually."

"The creation of a sculpture can be considered the process by which a sculptor demonstrates to himself whether or not he is creating a sculpture."

"A sculptor can be thought of as the sort of person who can reduce impressions of things, responses, and ideas about things into sculptural forms."

"I am interested more than anything else in being a free person. To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make. My art is about art—embracing a vision of the future that is unlike past futures."

"Everything that exists, natural or man made, contains some sculptural quality or property."

"Sometimes it is not about making art. Sometimes it is about making statements about culture and history or history and culture with or through art."

"A pivotal figure in 20th century sculpture."