Top 100 Sidney Poitier Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Since I couldn’t actuate the things that I wanted to do, the only weapon I had was to say no.”

— Sidney Poitier

52. “I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.”

— Sidney Poitier

53. “My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that’s my dad. And he was a very good man.”

— Sidney Poitier

54. “John Cassavetes once gave me some advice that has proved invaluable... He said, ‘We’re good friends, but never, ever do an artistic favor for a friend. Loan friends money, be there for them in every other way, but don’t do them any artistic favors, because you’ve got to have one area of your life where there’s no room for compromise.”

— Sidney Poitier

55. “The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message – finally.”

— Sidney Poitier

56. “We are what we are, and half of what we are is what we are not.”

— Sidney Poitier

57. “I wouldn’t change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.”

— Sidney Poitier

58. “But my dad also was a remarkable man, a good person, a principled individual, a man of integrity.”

— Sidney Poitier

59. “Racism is very painful. That’s life. It never ends.”

— Sidney Poitier

60. “I learned to hear silence. That’s the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.”

— Sidney Poitier

61. “A tiny bit of myself is lost when my friends are gone. A tiny bit of myself was lost when my brothers, all but one, passed away.”

— Sidney Poitier

62. “Jackie Robinson is a true legend.”

— Sidney Poitier

63. “I don’t very often read novels.”

— Sidney Poitier

64. “As a man, I’ve been representative of the values I hold dear. And the values I hold dear are carryovers from the lives of my parents.”

— Sidney Poitier

65. “I’d seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.”

— Sidney Poitier

66. “My father was the quintessential husband and dad.”

— Sidney Poitier

67. “There is a certain anger; it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage – self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage – and its flame burns because the world is so unjust.”

— Sidney Poitier

68. “I think the way I want to think. I live the way I want to live.”

— Sidney Poitier

69. “I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it – all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.”

— Sidney Poitier

70. “I find myself, at this time in my life, no less challenged, no less plagued, no less intrigued by what I still don’t know.”

— Sidney Poitier

71. “Okay listen, you think I’m so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value – to you I say, I’m not talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you.”

— Sidney Poitier

72. “I had to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual fans. It was a terrific burden.”

— Sidney Poitier

73. “Between the American mythology of “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and the orthodoxy of entitlements, where’s the enduring commitment for the long haul, the consistent vision of how to weave the less fortunate into a decent and humane society?”

— Sidney Poitier

74. “We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?”

— Sidney Poitier

75. “The great disease of mankind is ignorance.”

— Sidney Poitier

76. “It is not a bad idea, Ayele, as you grow into adulthood, to fix your eye on people of your parents’ generation, or perhaps those even older, to find those you can admire for their qualities of character and contribution. Heroes and role models are important, especially because when you think of them they have the ability to buoy your spirits and ignite your energies to move you onward. In.”

— Sidney Poitier

77. “My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.”

— Sidney Poitier

78. “I lived in a country where I couldn’t live where I wanted to live. I lived in a country where I couldn’t go where I wanted to eat. I lived in a country where I couldn’t get a job, except for those put aside for people of my colour or caste.”

— Sidney Poitier

79. “I had two roles for which I compromised.”

— Sidney Poitier

80. “Greed and cruelty are pretty widely distributed throughout humanity, as are their victims.”

— Sidney Poitier

81. “My father was very big on marriage.”

— Sidney Poitier

82. “The willingness to receive help and appreciate its value when it arrives, sometimes unannounced, is a subject that returns us to the question of why and how our lives turn out as they do.”

— Sidney Poitier

83. “I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.”

— Sidney Poitier

84. “I cannot be understood in three minutes.”

— Sidney Poitier

85. “Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.”

— Sidney Poitier

86. “Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson’s.”

— Sidney Poitier

87. “I couldn’t adjust to the racism in Florida.”

— Sidney Poitier

88. “I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself – not me, but black people – that were uncomfortable.”

— Sidney Poitier

89. “We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.”

— Sidney Poitier

90. “I didn’t run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.”

— Sidney Poitier

91. “I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.”

— Sidney Poitier

92. “I come from a great family. I’ve seen family life and I know how wonderful, how nurturing, and how wonderful it can be.”

— Sidney Poitier

93. “I’m going to quit writing.”

— Sidney Poitier

94. “I wanted to explore the values that are at work, underpinning my life.”

— Sidney Poitier

95. “I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else’s vision of me.”

— Sidney Poitier

96. “To be compared to Jackie Robinson is an enormous compliment, but I don’t think it’s necessarily deserved.”

— Sidney Poitier

97. “I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me.”

— Sidney Poitier

98. “I had learned something of Miami from people who had visited there, so I knew what to expect.”

— Sidney Poitier

99. “There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It’s everywhere.”

— Sidney Poitier

100. “Stay from underfoot and don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?” “Yes, ma’am, I hear you.” Due to past experience, she may not have completely believed me. When.”

— Sidney Poitier