Top 60 Tavis Smiley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes rejection in life is really redirection.”

— Tavis Smiley

Featured in: Rejection Quotes

2. “Why don’t we scale up those things that do work.”

— Tavis Smiley

3. “Poverty and wealth inequality are a form of instability into the future.”

— Tavis Smiley

4. “Don’t envy someone else’s gift. Discover your own.”

— Tavis Smiley

5. “Music is the soundtrack of our lives, it’s essential for our lives.”

— Tavis Smiley

6. “Take your focus off how others see you. Cease being obsessed with the need to impress your friends and your foes. Keep your concern on the vision you see in the mirror. Don’t allow the approval of others to obstruct your view of you.”

— Tavis Smiley

7. “Struggling to stay in the middle class, and I love that. That’s me and my dad and my family.”

— Tavis Smiley

8. “When you work for something, you appreciate it more. So what are y’all going to do with all the opportunities you inherited that you didn’t have to work for?”

— Tavis Smiley

9. “The storm came. Lives were washed away. Ancient pains resurfaced. Now it is time for a sea of change.”

— Tavis Smiley

10. “Having to try and going through the trials and tribulations to actually overcome, to get there to win, to triumph, that’s what makes life interesting.”

— Tavis Smiley

11. “How do you grow up in the shadow of a guy – I want to talk about the movie in a second – but how do you grow up in the shadow of a guy who really is a legend in his own time?”

— Tavis Smiley

12. “That is still the case in this country for too many students, the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you don’t expect them to learn, if you don’t expect them to succeed – then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

— Tavis Smiley

13. “I grew. Going outside my comfort zone is a big one for me.”

— Tavis Smiley

14. “I fear that we are living in a society, living in a world where forgiving people is becoming more and more difficult to do.”

— Tavis Smiley

15. “I love my cross-sectioned, cross-cultural audience. Some of them are doing better than the average guy, but my audience has always been people who are struggling to stay in the middle class.”

— Tavis Smiley

16. “The choices we make about the lives we live determine the kinds of legacies we leave.”

— Tavis Smiley

17. “Regardless of your race, religion or political affiliation, never hesitate to question those in authority.”

— Tavis Smiley

18. “Fear, fear, breeds hopelessness. When you’re afraid, you don’t know what to believe in, you don’t know what to hold on to. You’re struggling to find something to believe in.”

— Tavis Smiley

19. “Jamestown changed the world in many ways, but perhaps it shaped our nation most profoundly the day Africans arrived. I can’t think of a more relevant place to talk about the issues facing our community today than the place where African culture became American culture.”

— Tavis Smiley

20. “Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody’s got to look over the shoulder of that child.”

— Tavis Smiley

21. “I think the issue of women’s choice is essential for a woman being able to have their lives – if they cannot control their own bodies by choosing if or when to have a child, then they cannot control their working life or anything around them.”

— Tavis Smiley

22. “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”

— Tavis Smiley

23. “The old African proverb says, ‘The ax forgets; the tree remembers.’ I saw how horrifically it injured us to identify with our oppressors. If we were to keep our souls whole, we couldn’t afford to forget. We had to remember.”

— Tavis Smiley

24. “We give you the facts. I told you information is power – knowledge is power. We can’t be in an ideological battle to redeem the soul of this country if we don’t have the facts.”

— Tavis Smiley

25. “I love the fight. I don’t – it’s not a negative, it’s a positive, and I love the challenge. There’s that little part of me that I love proving someone wrong in that way when they have an image of me or something, or they think they have me figured out or they think I’m a certain way.”

— Tavis Smiley

26. “History is replete with examples of moments in time when we talk about deficit reduction and try to advance on it around the world, that is, where it leads to job losses, not job creation.”

— Tavis Smiley

27. “If you don’t have courage, you can’t practice any of the other virtues.”

— Tavis Smiley

28. “The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category...”

— Tavis Smiley

29. “What determines your altitude in life is your attitude.”

— Tavis Smiley

30. “We think of – there are too many wars, of course, in the world as we speak, but my read on this suggests to me that water is going to be the resource into the future that we’re really – that countries, nations, are going to be fighting for control over.”

— Tavis Smiley

31. “For me, like when you’ve put yourself out there emotionally, physically, and you’ve really put yourself on the line, for me, that means I’ve really done something.”

— Tavis Smiley

32. “I’m very musically curious and I love new experience. I’m an adventurer. Some people want to sort of stay in a safe zone and repeat the same things and give them more depth, and I want to do new things all the time.”

— Tavis Smiley

33. “I think a lot of people who go to drama school have this ease with the text and they all have five monologues that they know by heart, and I never had that. I’ve done Chekov and I’ve done Moliere and I’ve done classic stuff.”

— Tavis Smiley

34. “This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.”

— Tavis Smiley

35. “Leonard Pitts, Jr. is the most insightful and inspiring columnist of his generation.”

— Tavis Smiley

36. “I think when I stop fighting, I die in a sense.”

— Tavis Smiley

37. “Live just because or live your life for a cause.”

— Tavis Smiley

38. “Competition’s always been a product of American lifestyle.”

— Tavis Smiley

39. “This is not a skill problem, this is a will problem. Does America have the will to make education a priority? We know the things that work. Why don’t we scale up those things that do work.”

— Tavis Smiley

40. “My acting gives me my self-worth.”

— Tavis Smiley

41. “All he could think of was how all people require attention. All people require respect. All people require acknowledgment. All people require love.”

— Tavis Smiley

42. “My role on television is one of helping people reexamine the assumptions that they hold. I regard Dr. King. You would never hear me get up and speak without in some way, shape or form, referencing, Dr. King.”

— Tavis Smiley

43. “We’re all cracked vessels, and we’re always in process, I think, every one of us.”

— Tavis Smiley

44. “I learned early on that it’s heartbreaking to – there’s the editor that comes in, and then they have to craft the movie together, and sometimes you give a whole performance that’s just been cut up, and maybe it’s better for it, absolutely, but you still have to deal with the loss of that.”

— Tavis Smiley

45. “In some states, not even 50 percent of black boys finish high school.”

— Tavis Smiley

46. “I think, for most of us is that once you get to a certain place in your career you’re not having to elbow and knock people around and audition for parts.”

— Tavis Smiley

47. “I use the phrase “fellow citizen” all the time when referring to the – people always say, “The American people, the American people.” I prefer the phrase fellow citizen because there’s a power in that, there’s a responsibility, there’s a duty in using that phrase fellow citizen.”

— Tavis Smiley

48. “To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.”

— Tavis Smiley

49. “Troubled times do call for troubled songs, songs that unsettle our souls and our spirits unapologetically.”

— Tavis Smiley

50. “This administration and these folk who run Washington are no more interested in our welfare and our well being than the man on the moon. And we have got to start taking our destiny into our hands.”

— Tavis Smiley