Sammy Davis, Jr. Quotes (55 Quotes)

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

During three decades, along all the highways of my youth, Frank had always been there for me.

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

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

There are certain romances that belong in certain cities, in a certain atmosphere, in a certain time.

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

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.

With an ocean between you and your European friends, you have to keep them in your heart.

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

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

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

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

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

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

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

Ten million dollars after I'd become a star I was deeply in debt.

Though I love the luxury of the Waldorf Towers, room service there doesn't do soul food.

I don't have many easy songs.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.

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.

You don't swing where you sleep.

Marilyn and I were rumored to be an item. We were friends. Nothing more. Marilyn was one of the sweetest creatures that ever lived.

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

If you want to get known as a singer you hire five sexy chicks and let them fight over you onstage and for the cameras. That's publicity, man.

I go to temple a lot less than I would like because when I do, people still look at me as if they think it's a publicity stunt.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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.

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

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

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

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.

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

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.

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

I believed in Bobby Kennedy. Campaigning for him was an attempt to give back something to this country that has given me so much.

You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.

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

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

'The Entertainer' He did it all.

I gotta be me.

We can't answer King's assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.

To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.

My home has always been show business.

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.

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.

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

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.

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

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.