Bill Russell Quotes

Most people have a harder time letting themselves love than finding someone to love them. ~ Bill Russell

The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I'd made my teammates play. ~ Bill Russell

If you can take something to levels that very few other people can reach, then what you're doing becomes art. ~ Bill Russell

Success is a result of consistent practice of winning skills and actions. There is nothing miraculous about the process. There is no luck involved. ~ Bill Russell

We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us - anything more than that would be too much for us to bear. ~ Bill Russell

If you really have integrity, there are very few people who can insult you, or honor you. ~ Bill Russell

Wilt Chamberlain had a great deal to do with the success of the NBA. His dominance, power, demeanor and the rivalry with Bill Russell says it all. He will be sorely missed by myself and everyone in the basketball community. Wilt was a great performer and a great athlete. ~ Red Auerbach

People say it was the greatest individual rivalry they've ever seen. I agree with that. Let me assure you that if either Wilt's or Russ' coach had ever told one of them he couldn't guard the other guy, he would have lost that player forever. ~ Bill Russell

To love someone is nothing, to be loved by someone is something, to love someone who loves you is everything ~ Bill Russell

Remember that basketball is a game of habits. If you make the other guy deviate from his habits, you've got him ~ Bill Russell

What distinguishes a great player is his presence. When he goes on to the court, his presence dominates the atmosphere. ~ Bill Russell

A rebounder, or a shot-blocker for that matter, is always at a disadvantage if he tells himself the only way he can succeed is by out jumping the guy next to him. Sometimes he will have to, but most of the time he will not. Most of my rebounds came from positioning, where I was able to get the ball while in heavy traffic. ~ Bill Russell

Bill Russell helped make my dream a better dream because when you play with the best, you know you have to play your best. ~ Wilt Chamberlain

If a guy pays you five dollars, you give him seven dollars worth of work. ~ Bill Russell

I think that David Stern is probably the greatest commissioner that any sport has ever had in the history of this country. ~ Bill Russell

After I played him for the first time, I said 'Let's see. He's four or five inches taller. He's 40 or 50 pounds heavier. His vertical leap is at least as good as mine. He can get up and down the floor as well as I can. And he's smart. The real problem with all this is I have to show up. ~ Bill Russell

I guarantee you, if you could give me 10 points in all those seventh games against the Boston Celtics, instead of Bill Russell having 11 rings, I could've at least had nine or eight. ~ Wilt Chamberlain

I think what has happened to our basketball team, we've been badly distracted. They're not reading too many positive things in the paper. ~ Bill Russell

To me, the most important part of winning is joy. You can win without joy, but winning that's joyless is like eating in a four-star restaurant when you're not hungry. Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight, that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best. ~ Bill Russell

Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory. ~ Bill Russell

My father once told me that anyone who worked for three dollars an hour owed it to himself to put in four dollars' worth of work. ~ Bill Russell

Bill Russell is one of the great names in basketball, an all-American ... and the only athlete to ever win an NCAA Championship, an Olympic Gold Medal, and a professional championship all in the same year-1956 ... But Bill Russell had this one problem: He threw up before every game. ~ John Eliot

Friendship is a full-time job. ~ Bill Russell

Don't knock the ball in the stands, keep it in your hands! ~ Bill Russell

The magic to a great meeting is all of the work that's done beforehand. ~ Bill Russell

The only important statistic is the final score. ~ Bill Russell

I've been fortunate to meet and work with a lot of really smart people. The thing that strikes me most about them is how they continue to explore and learn every day. I have tried to apply that approach in my modest career as well. ~ Bill Russell

The last five or six days, I've been running. The last two days, I've been running pretty hard. Everybody's got to be someplace. ~ Bill Russell

Karen Russell learned to think from her father, someone Peter Gammons knows well, Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell, who used his prominence to support Martin Luther King Jr., to support the civil rights movement, and other important work, including work in Africa throughout his career. And Bill Russell is still at it. ~ Donald Trump

Create unselfishness as the most important team attribute. ~ Bill Russell

What's more important than who's going to be the first black manager is who's going to be the first black sports editor of the New York Times. ~ Bill Russell

I don't have very many regrets, not because I lived a perfect life but because life is a bunch of rolling hills, not mountains, or speed bumps instead of stop signs, and so you come to a situation and it's neither good or bad, it just is, and what it means to you is what's your take on it. But the second part of the equation is what are you going to do about it. A lot of times I'm completely wrong, but all you do is back up and start over. ~ Bill Russell

I would have loved to play against Bill Russell. He was such a force. ~ Tim Duncan

We overreached our decision power. Sometimes our decisions have to fit the reality of the outside world. ~ Bill Russell

I hope I epitomize the American dream. For I came against long odds, from the ghetto to the very top of my profession. I was not immediately good at basketball. It did not come easy. It came as the result of a lot of hard work and self-sacrifice. The rewards, where they worth it? One thousand times over. ~ Bill Russell

My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library. ~ Bill Russell

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away. So ~ Bill Bryson

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it. ~ Bill Nye

The forest belongs to all who live within its cycles and seasons ~ D.S. Russell

The Olympic movement is divided into two very distinct eras. ~ Bill Toomey

In a comprehensive study of all public multiple shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that the only public policy that reduced both the incidence and casualties of such shootings were concealed-carry laws. Not only are there 60 percent fewer gun massacres after states adopt concealed-carry laws, but the death and injury rate of such rampages are reduced by 80 percent. ~ Ann Coulter

Nal had begun to sense that his life had jumped the rails - and then right at his nadir, he'd agreed to an "avant" haircut performed by Cousin Steve. ~ Karen Russell

A gang of unpredictable ruffians by day who turned to enthralling storytellers after dark. I would sometimes join them, and listen for a great part of the night to some of the finest fairy tales and most romantic legends it has ever been my fortune to hear. ~ Russell S. Bonds

The only way for mankind to survive is for religion to die. ~ Bill Maher

When I say "most people" I mean, of course, me after my first cocktail. ~ Bill Bryson

Whenever the people are for gay marriage or medical marijuana or assisted suicide, suddenly the 'will of the people' goes out the window. ~ Bill Maher

Animal rights, taken to their logical conclusion, mean votes for oysters. ~ Bertrand Russell

I tend to go through periods worrying, "Where am I going, I can't see a way out of this," and it becomes quite stressful. But sometimes you have to take a bet on yourself. ~ Bill Bailey

The beautiful thing about older people is their ability to cut the fat off of conversation. When they talk, they don't go on forever and ever. They say what they have to say, and that's it. That was my grand dad. Some of the things he said stunned me, but his words were logical. I'll never forget them. ~ Bill Cosby

Liberals want Conservatives to shut up. Conservatives want Liberals to keep talking. Because our arguments make sense and theirs don't ~ Bill Whittle

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions. ~ Karen Russell

Service is the key to everything in life. ~ Russell Simmons

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest. ~ Karen Russell

My fine friends who are perfectionists, each in their own world where they are petty dictators, could write a perfect bill. Those of us who have grown up and matured ... understand that we have to work together on the big issues. ~ Newt Gingrich

And after all I've done, I'm not sure the devil isn't coming after me. ~ Bill Lockwood

I felt weightless. I felt nothing would happen to me. I felt that anything might happen to me. I was looking straight ahead, running, trying to keep up, and things were occurring along the dark peripheries of my vision: there would be a bright light and then darkness again and the sound, constantly, of something else breaking, and of movement, of objects being thrown and of people falling. ~ Bill Buford

A tax loophole is something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform. ~ Russell B. Long

Honesty has always been an integral part of my operation, really. ~ Russell Brand

But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it's in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit "new" rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document. ~ Thom Hartmann

In the next 15 years, we can halve childhood deaths. That's doable. ~ Bill Gates

I have little patience with people who take the Bill of Rights for granted. The Bill of Rights, contained in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, is every American's guarantee of freedom. ~ Harry S. Truman

Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character. ~ James Russell Lowell

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles. ~ Bill Gates

I don't think anyone has ever announced running for president that they want to change the Bill of Rights. ~ George Will

...I find it hard not to think of our home as a chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown. I miss my daughter. The rug bristles with the absence of her dancing feet. The windows glint with the history of her looking. Water rings on the sills recall where her teacup should be. The air lacks a sweet buzz. ~ Scott Russell Sanders

I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American. ~ Bill Bryson

It would be kind of a tragedy if we got to the end of four years of Democratic rule without having really tried any Democratic policies. ~ Bill Maher

The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium28, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms. ~ Bill Bryson

If any writer thinks the world is full of middle class people of nice sensibilities, then he is out of his mind. ~ Bill Vaughan

France ... What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully-conceived and brilliantly-executed war in Iraq? ~ Bill Maher