Sidney Poitier

So I'm OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was.

My mother was the most amazing person. She taught me to be kind to other women. She believed in family. She was with my father from the first day they met. All that I am, she taught me.

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

History passes the final judgment.

I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

My father was the quintessential husband and dad.

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.

Generally, I tend to despise human behavior rather than human creatures.

I cannot be understood in three minutes.

The journey has been incredible from its beginning.

But my dad also was a remarkable man, a good person, a principled individual, a man of integrity.

If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't.

I'll always be chasing you... Glory.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.

In America, it is difficult to be your own man.

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.

Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson's.

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

But I always had the ability to say no. That's how I called my own shots.

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.