Sammy Davis Jr. Quotes

Part of show business is magic. You don't know how it happens.

I wasn't anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.

I've done some things I wish I could erase ... I invented mistakes. But the mistakes must be seen in context, and they must be weighed along with the positives.

Sober up, and you see and hear everything you'd been able to avoid hearing before.

Bogart could have been color blind. He got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.

There's nothing that can match Broadway for stature and dignity.

Imitations only better the original.

When Liza Minelli was a child, she used to sit on my lap and call me Uncle Sammy.

I'd learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz.

Sinatra is the essence of vocal style. This man has an innate quality of knowing what is good musically. You can sum that up best by saying that he has musical integrity. Even when he does a bad song, there's a good quality in the presentation.

All I really had was my talent. Without that I wouldn't be welcome at the White House.

I have a respect for Elvis and my friendship. It ain't my business what he did in private. The only thing I want to know is, 'Was he my friend?', 'Did I enjoy him as a performer?', 'Did he give the world of entertainment something?' - and the answer is YES on all accounts. The other jazz just don't matter.

You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.

My handicap? Man, I am a one-eyed, black Jew! That's my handicap!

You don't swing where you sleep.

Wishing, hoping and regretting are the most common and dangerous tactics for evading the present.

When you lose a lover it's like getting a bad haircut. It grows back in time.

In terms of addiction, there is nothing more powerful than men's toys.

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

A man is not complete until he has seen the baby he has made.

I had traveled 10 states and played over 50 cities by the time I was 4.

Being in public with May and the children was too heavy. I was irreversibly tuned in to everyone around us.

The only person I ever hurt was myself and even that I did to the minimum. If you can do that and you're still functioning, you're the luckiest person in the world.

I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money.

You have to be able to look back at your life and say, "Yeah, that was fun."

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Elvis eleven.

Once I get outside my house in the morning, I'm on.

I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.

The one thing you don't want is that stale sound when you've done a line so much you can't find a fresh approach to it. Drop it.

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.

After I decided to become a Jew, only then did I learn that the Jews don't have all the money. When I found out Rockefeller and Ford were goyim, I almost resigned.

May was young and beautiful, we were legally married, but she was caught in the prison of my skin.

Most orgies that you go to, I have found, most of it is sad. All that wildness, all those laughs were like the shining silver and gold paper on packages, but there was nothing inside.

Real success is not on the stage, but off the stage as a human being, and how you get along with your fellow man.

Fame comes with its own standard. A guy who twitches his lips is just another guy with a lip twitch - unless he's Humphrey Bogart.

I saw that my image was changing or fading. One of the reasons for taking a break from clubs was to be missed-not forgotten.

The success of the Rat Pack or the Clan was due to the camaraderie, the three guys who work together and kid each other and love each other.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

There are lines that I know are going to get a belly laugh, but after a few shows I get sick of hearing myself say them so I drop them.

Would it be better if I'd married a Negro woman? Would they treat my child any better? Erect fewer barriers?

My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking,

I didn't hate being 60 as much as I had 50.

Talk about handicap! I'm a one-eyed Negro Jew.