Top 60 Sammy Davis Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

2. “If you want to be the best, baby, you’ve got to work harder than anybody else.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

3. “My handicap? Man, I am a one-eyed, black Jew! That’s my handicap!”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

Featured in: Fun Quotes

5. “The ultimate mystery is one’s own self.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

6. “Sober up, and you see and hear everything you’d been able to avoid hearing before.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

7. “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.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

9. “Savor the moments that are warm and special and giggly.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

12. “Part of show business is magic. You don’t know how it happens.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

13. “Imitations only better the original.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

16. “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.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

18. “My mother was born in San Juan. So I’m Puerto Rican, Jewish, colored and married to a white woman. When I move into a neighborhood, people start running four ways at the same time.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

19. “My home has always been show business.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

20. “Tap dancing all started with the old clog waltz.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

22. “The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

23. “You don’t swing where you sleep.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

25. “Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

26. “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.

Featured in: Strong Quotes

27. “In terms of addiction, there is nothing more powerful than men’s toys.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

28. “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.

29. “All I really had was my talent. Without that I wouldn’t be welcome at the White House.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

30. “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.

31. “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.

32. “There’s nothing that can match Broadway for stature and dignity.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

34. “The civil rights movement wasn’t easy for anybody.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

35. “I don’t have many easy songs.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

37. “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.

38. “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.

39. “Ten million dollars after I’d become a star I was deeply in debt.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

40. “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.

41. “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.

42. “Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

46. “When you lose a lover it’s like getting a bad haircut. It grows back in time.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

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

— Sammy Davis Jr.

48. “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.

49. “Once I get outside my house in the morning, I’m on.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.

50. “I hadn’t been in Vegas 20 minutes when I got word that the bookmakers were offering three to one that Frank wouldn’t show for my wedding.”

— Sammy Davis Jr.