Top 90 Jack Kirby Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life at best is bittersweet.”

— Jack Kirby

2. “Our dreams make us large.”

— Jack Kirby

3. “If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ’em. Take those hands.”

— Jack Kirby

4. “I feel that any man that tries, any man that comes out with something we like, is a good man. A man doesn’t have to be Leonardo Da Vinci to be sincere.”

— Jack Kirby

5. “Superman is going to live forever. They’ll be reading Superman in the next century when you and I are gone. I felt, in that respect, I was doing the same thing. I wanted to be known. I wasn’t going to sell a comic that was going to die quickly.”

— Jack Kirby

6. “I feel that man can transcend himself to a point where he can accomplish greater things than he thinks. I see people depressed and I see people who devalue themselves and I feel that’s a terrible, terrible waste. But I love the people who try. But try fairly, try honestly.”

— Jack Kirby

7. “All human beings have the capability of doing what they want, what they’re attracted to.”

— Jack Kirby

8. “There are people that I didn’t like, but I saw them suffer and it changed me. I promised myself that I would never tell a lie, never hurt another human being, and I would try to make the world as positive as I could.”

— Jack Kirby

9. “Some of my friends became gangsters. You became a gangster depending upon how fast you wanted a suit. Gangsters weren’t the stereotypes you see in the movies. I knew the real ones, and the real ones were out for big money.”

— Jack Kirby

10. “The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it.”

— Jack Kirby

11. “Perfectionists are their own devils.”

— Jack Kirby

12. “I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.”

— Jack Kirby

13. “I feel that man can transcend himself to a point where he can accomplish greater things than he thinks.”

— Jack Kirby

14. “I never duck out of a fight; I don’t care what the hell the odds are, and I’m rough at times, but I try to be a decent guy all the time. That’s the way I’ve always lived.”

— Jack Kirby

15. “Aw, where we come from the Anti-Life Equation is one of many others – almost as awesome!! But they merely exist!!”

— Jack Kirby

16. “Once we’ve learned enough about the universe we will admit to ourselves that we will never know everything.”

— Jack Kirby

17. “I felt the comics grew because they became the common man’s literature, the common man’s art, the common man’s publishing.”

— Jack Kirby

18. “I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I’ve been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I’m very well-versed in science fact and science fiction.”

— Jack Kirby

19. “I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that’ll take us through.”

— Jack Kirby

20. “I’ve never done anything bad. I can’t do anything bad. It’s got to be professional. It’s got to look professional. It’s got to read professional. In other words, it serves its purpose by entertaining a reader.”

— Jack Kirby

21. “You fought fair. If the other guy wants to fight and you knocked him out, you did your best for him. You didn’t want to hurt him any more.”

— Jack Kirby

22. “I like entertainment. I’m an innate admirer of good entertainment. I’ll listen to MTV, I’ll listen to Mozart, I’ll listen to anything that has a good element in it.”

— Jack Kirby

23. “I’ve never done anything half-heartedly; it’s a disservice to me and the audience if I do it half-heartedly.”

— Jack Kirby

24. “I was a good student in the subjects that I wanted to be good in. The curriculum in my section was excellent.”

— Jack Kirby

25. “I achieved perfection, my type of perfection – visual storytelling. Storytelling was my style.”

— Jack Kirby

26. “I don’t like to work in an office. I like to work in my house, to be among my own thoughts. The idea is for an editor to let his artist alone, let them be themselves, let them exchange their own ideas and you’ll come up with something salable.”

— Jack Kirby

27. “Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way. My stories began to get noticed because the average reader could associate with them.”

— Jack Kirby

28. “I didn’t like Army life. I didn’t like taking orders. I didn’t like discipline. I didn’t like being yelled at. You’d get 10 years for punching a sergeant so I couldn’t punch a sergeant.”

— Jack Kirby

29. “I feel that my characters all have some part of my character. I feel that they’re all me in some way, certainly not in individuality, but they all bear elements of what I feel.”

— Jack Kirby

30. “I always resent anybody interfering with anybody else trying to do his job. Everybody has his own job to do. If he’s good, he’ll do well, but if he’s mediocre, he’s not going to do as well as he should.”

— Jack Kirby

31. “My parents loved me. My father used to carry me around on my shoulders. I know my father loved me. All families love their children, and we were good boys.”

— Jack Kirby

32. “I wouldn’t call Adolf Hitler a corporal. Adolf Hitler was looked up to. He was revered almost like a God because he was feared. Adolf Hitler took all of Europe, and my generation had to confront Adolf Hitler.”

— Jack Kirby

33. “Everybody can draw, in my estimation. If you give a man 50 years, he’ll come up with the Mona Lisa.”

— Jack Kirby

34. “I’ve never done anything half-heartedly. It’s the reason my comics did well. It’s the reason my comics were drawn well. I can’t do anything bad.”

— Jack Kirby

35. “I hated to fight all the time just to enjoy my day. Fighting wasn’t the kind of thing that I enjoyed, but I grew to enjoy it because I did it so long.”

— Jack Kirby

36. “If America gave anybody anything it is ambition. Bad things would come out of it because some guys are in a hurry, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil or anything, it just means they fall into bad grace somehow.”

— Jack Kirby

37. “A good commander can beat the odds. A great commander can beat the gods.”

— Jack Kirby

38. “I’ll never speak to another person without telling the truth. I’ve been a cruel man in my time, I’ve been a devious man in my time, like everybody else. I’ve told lies in my time. But I’ve seen enough suffering to experiment with the truth.”

— Jack Kirby

39. “I had very high respect for the Pratt Institute, but I thought that I had done my best, and that was not their version of the best.”

— Jack Kirby

40. “My anatomy was self-taught. I feel everybody has that ability. I drew instinctively. Mine was an instinctive style.”

— Jack Kirby

41. “I won’t do anything bad, and I resent very deeply bad people who haven’t got the ability, who try to interfere with the kind of work I’m trying to do because nobody’s going to benefit from it.”

— Jack Kirby

42. “I feel that life is a series of very interesting questions, and very poor answers. But I myself am willing to settle for the questions. If the questions are interesting, I feel I evoke them in what I do. I feel that should be good enough for everyone else.”

— Jack Kirby

43. “An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals.”

— Jack Kirby

44. “Speaking as a human being, not as a businessman – the unions are great. The unions are great for the working people because they protect you, but I didn’t see them that way as a young man. First of all, the papers would connect them with thee communists – labor unions were communists.”

— Jack Kirby

45. “A man is entitled to draw things in his own style. I didn’t hurt Superman. I made him powerful. I admire Superman, but I’ve got to do my own style.”

— Jack Kirby

46. “Mort Meskin was a consummate professional, dedicated to his work. A great talent.”

— Jack Kirby

47. “I’m a happy man because whatever I’m doing, I do for myself and I do a little creating here and there for others, and they work out very well.”

— Jack Kirby

48. “My own son feels I’m uncool but my grandson loves me. Being cool or uncool is a generational thing. But as a personal thing, I really love everybody in sight.”

— Jack Kirby

49. “My purpose was what my father’s purpose was – to make a living and to have a family. I was going to do the right thing. My dream to me was to have money to support it and to live in the kind of house I liked.”

— Jack Kirby

50. “It’s not in the draftsmanship, it’s in the man. Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. It’s in the man. If you want to do it, you do it.”

— Jack Kirby