Sammy Davis Jr Quotes

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Ramon looked closely at the little guy as he ate. "Maybe he's Jewish. I mean, if Sammy Davis Jr. could convert to Judaism, why not a chupacabra? We should name him Harry Mendelbaum."
I held up my arms in protest. "You're all racist. Now shut up. We'll call him Taco von Precious of Svenenstein. There, everybody happy?"
"Isn't von the same thing as of?" Frank asked. "Wouldn't that be kind of redundant?"
"You're redundant," I said. ~ Lish McBride

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

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

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

You don't swing where you sleep. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Elvis eleven. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

A man is not complete until he has seen the baby he has made. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Once I get outside my house in the morning, I'm on. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

Wishing, hoping and regretting are the most common and dangerous tactics for evading the present. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Here's the mark that a lot of people miss nowadays. Producers missed. They leave out the heart and soul. And that's what I learned from Sammy Davis, Jr., from Frank Sinatra, is when you went to go see those shows, you got to know them. ~ Donny Osmond

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

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

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

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

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

I didn't hate being 60 as much as I had 50. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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, ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

I became the storyteller of South Side Chicago. I used an old Kiwi liquid shoe polish as a microphone. I'd go around the house interviewing everybody, telling stupid jokes, doing voices. I mimicked Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., people on 'Laugh-In,' Flip Wilson. ~ Bernie Mac

I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Part of show business is magic. You don't know how it happens. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

Would you believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. taught me how to sing a ballad? 'You can be in an arena,' he said, 'and you should be able to hold their attention.' ~ Gladys Knight

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

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

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

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn't any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own. ~ Kenny Ortega

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

My handicap? Man, I am a one-eyed, black Jew! That's my handicap! ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

There's nothing that can match Broadway for stature and dignity. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Moshe Dayan, who said to Sammy Davis, Jr., That's funny, to me you only look half Jewish. Never got a dinner! ~ Red Buttons

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

Imitations only better the original. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Talk about handicap! I'm a one-eyed Negro Jew. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

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

Please stop assuming that longevity and perfect health is always the correct option. No. Sometimes fun costs ya. It just does, you know? And that's OK, you're willing to make that purchase. Sammy Davis, Jr. was 64 when he died. Give me 64 Sammy-years, I'll be happy. ~ Bill Maher

A lot of people who were the best in their fields. I was fortunate enough to be friends with Sammy Davis, Jr. - I spent a lot of time with Sammy. I was over at his house almost every night. Those people were very special and very special for me. ~ James Darren

I liked old time music but what i meant by that was the period from the 1930s through the 60s, nothing before and little after.
Performers like fats waller, Sinatra, billie holiday, louis armstrong, rosemary clooney, ella, sammy Davis Jr, dean martin ... If the lyrics weren't stupid. Words were important. ~ Jeffery Deaver

I look at the careers of people I'm standing on the shoulders of. People like Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and Sarah Vaughan. These are icons I wanted to emulate, and I feel like they've been holding me up for quite a long time. ~ Dionne Warwick

People like Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Marlene Dietrich and Sammy Davis Jr. all walked me down this path of entertainment. ~ Dionne Warwick

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. ~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Tom Jones is funny to me, man. I mean, he really tries to ape Ray Charles and Sammy Davis, you know. He's nice-looking; he looks good doing it. I mean, if I was him, I'd do the same thing. If I was only thinking about making money. ~ Miles Davis

For a group of people supposedly saved by grace, loved unconditionally, and secure in our relationship with Christ, we certainly carry a lot of guilt and baggage in our relationship with God. ~ Will Davis Jr.

Desperation yields dependency, and dependency yields power. And as you decrease your earthly abilities through sacrifice and embracing less, you'll see your spiritual fruit increase. ~ Will Davis Jr.

It is impossible for Christians to lose their salvation. Everything about the nature of salvation argues for its permanency. God doesn't give and then take the gift back; he doesn't adopt and then unadopt. ~ Will Davis Jr.

As Christians, we're going to have bad days, but they aren't typically a result of our lack of love for Jesus. The fact is we live in a sinful world. Heartache is bound to come. ~ Will Davis Jr.

Make no mistake about it - Jesus extended his holy invitation for rest to you. You are not the grand exception in history that God cannot or will not love. You have not gone so far that he can't or won't forgive you. When Jesus spoke this invitation, he didn't aim it just at the really good people or the really pretty people or the really churchy people. He aimed it at the spiritually broken. ~ Will Davis Jr.

The Hebrews knew that by rest, God meant not only the protection of their boundaries from invading hordes but the emotional, mental, and spiritual confidence they would have knowing that God was irreversibly with them. Rest was inseparable from God's presence. One always accompanies the other. ~ Will Davis Jr.

I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty (John 6:35). ~ Will Davis Jr.

Many Christians still believe that salvation can be lost. Preachers still preach it, scholars still write about it, and well-meaning parents still warn their kids about it. "You'd better be careful and you better behave. If you go too far in your sin, God just might write you off - permanently. ~ Will Davis Jr.

Once you decide to forgive, you initiate the healing process. Forgiveness gives your soul permission to move on to the higher and healthier ground of emotional recovery. Forgiveness is to your soul what antibiotics are to infection. It is the curative agent that will help to fully restore your soul. It doesn't immediately remove the pain of defense but it does start you on the road to recovery. ~ Will Davis Jr.

The resources God gives us are to be used for the benefit of others, not ourselves. That's what so many of the Old Testament prophets said about justice: it shouldn't be only for those who can pay for it. Rather, those with more than enough need to make sure that those with less than enough get justice as well. ~ Will Davis Jr.

If we spend our days trying to avoid the landmines of stepping out of God's will, then will be afraid to take any risks for his kingdom. But when you know there is a net of grace, when you know that God will catch you and set you back on his path when you fall, then you'll feel the freedom to pursue the adventure that kingdom living is all about. ~ Will Davis Jr.

From the White House down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr had a father,. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life (John 8:12). ~ Will Davis Jr.

It's called 'Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness,' and it's about Miles Davis, the genius, and why he was the way he was, and how he changed music so many times. He changed music six times. So, I'm excited about that movie. ~ George Tillman, Jr.

Sammy Davis, I backed him up. I used to study him every night. I saw how great performers worked and was able to incorporate a little bit from the best. ~ Bobby Vinton

As long as a believer is worrying about whether or not they are truly saved, they will never grow up in spiritual maturity. It basically guarantees that a Christian will remain stuck in spiritual infancy. And worse, it paints a picture of God that is not only untrue but also unbiblical. It cheapens the gift of salvation – the gift of grace – and make God look like a finicky human. ~ Will Davis Jr.

Sammy Davis, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett ... their records sell in the millions; when I do it, it just trickles. But for the composer and lyricist, there's a tidy bit to be made that way, too, so I don't really mind. ~ Anthony Newley

I played with Mike Dunleavy Jr., and we got a great relationship on the Warriors. Knowing him and now knowing his dad, all I know is he's a man of his word. Anything that he's ever said to me has been honest and I respect that. ~ Baron Davis

He's not anybody's clone. He's Ken Griffey, Jr. As long as he continues to remind himself of that, he's going to be a very good player. ~ Chili Davis

Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean? ... in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid. ~ Marisha Pessl

Did Jesus suffer for his lack of faith? Was he "smitten by God" because he was a bad person or because he didn't love the Father? No. God's path for Christ took him through the valley of the shadow of death. It was Jesus' obedience to God, not his disobedience, that led him there. And like Job's misguided friends who assumed Job was suffering because he had done something wrong, we mistakenly assume that our Christian brothers and sisters, or even we ourselves, are suffering because we've failed God. More often than not, it's just the opposite. ~ Will Davis Jr.

Beauty derives from truth not perfection. ~ Thomas Davis Jr.

Do you think Sammy Davis ate Junior Mints? ~ George Carlin

If there is magic in this world it is surely born of words. ~ T.C. Davis Jr.

In the two weeks following the All-Star Game, baseball was largely upstaged by the events of the XXI Olympiad in Montreal, including Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci's seven perfect 10.0 scores, Bruce Jenner's record-setting decathlon triumph, and the five gold medals won by U.S. boxers Howard Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Leonard, Leo Randolph, and brothers Leon and Michael Spinks - the mightiest performance of any American boxing team in Olympic history. ~ Dan Epstein

Instead of fleeing God scrutiny, David welcomed it. It's like he was saying, Look God, since I can't hide from you, since you know my very thoughts before I think them, I want you to fully know me. Be in the very core, the essence of my being. If you're going to know me, then know everything about me! ~ Will Davis Jr.

If you ever get injured or have an asthma attack, the last words you get out are, 'Sammy Davis suite, please.' That's, like, three rooms on the eighth floor of Cedars-Sinai. ~ Charles Nelson Reilly

If we think we can somehow do something that God didn't expect or surprise him in some way, then we seriously underestimate the scope of God's knowledge. ~ Will Davis Jr.

Serving your enemies is the fastest way to learn to love them. ~ Will Davis Jr.

I'm doing what great artists before me did, like Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Eddie Cantor. I'm doing what they were doing, not at their level yet, but one day I will be. I'm just happy to be in their company. ~ Mike Tyson

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode. ~ Jerry Stahl

My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think I'm such hot stuff.

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.

That's how I feel. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The problem is that those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful, but somehow reduced to margins of history as the real world [(our world)] moves on We will be known as an era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. ~ Wade Davis

The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element - learning. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

While watching the current state of America, I have concluded we should welcome the truth no matter how it arrives and justice no matter who or what it affects. When we don't, we become a vessel of mendacity and hypocrisy. ~ Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Can violence and the use of force to effect change upon the universe be left to the young? Do they see what was, what is, and what might yet be? Have they suffered, watched evil fall upon the good, or good upon the evil?
Or should the burden of violence be left to those who can bear it most lightly - upon those who have closed their minds or their feelings? How can they understand the suffering that they must inflict?
Should the burden of force be laid upon the short-lived, who will not see the consequences of their actions? How can they dispense force with compassion if they can escape the knowledge of what they do?...
The greater the force brought to bear, the older and wiser must be the entity who wields it. Wisdom allows sorrow. Age allows experience, and knowledge reinforces wisdom and experience....
Those who would bear the burden of force must be those who are strong and do not seek it, for those who seek force would misuse it, and those who are weak would shy from what they must do....
Findings of the Colloquy
[Translated from the Farhkan]
1227-E.N.P. ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

I think people love nature after they experience it. I know I experienced it as a young man - I took a lot of hikes, I was involved in scouting. ~ Ed Begley, Jr.

The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I may not be perfect, but I'm trying. ~ Kristin Davis