Top 35 Tom Selleck Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Risk is the price you pay for opportunity.”

— Tom Selleck

Featured in: Risk-Taking Quotes

2. “I live a pretty simple life.”

— Tom Selleck

3. “Few of us are as good as we think we are; none of us are as good as we can be.”

— Tom Selleck

4. “Life isn’t fair, but you can be.”

— Tom Selleck

5. “Unless you treat failure as part of the journey, you’re never going to get anywhere.”

— Tom Selleck

6. “We judge ourselves by our good intentions, but we’re judged by our last word.”

— Tom Selleck

7. “My mustache gets so many questions he has his own agen now.”

— Tom Selleck

8. “On a day when you’re not feeling so good, you put on a happy face, it’s infectious – these things sound kind of corny and stupid, but this is our life.”

— Tom Selleck

9. “Shooting clay targets is a very cleansing experience. It’s very relaxing. It takes a lot of concentration. It’s also very social, since you’re usually shooting with friends. You can talk and forget about almost anything else that’s on your mind.”

— Tom Selleck

10. “Hopefully you marry someone who you not only love, but who you like as well.”

— Tom Selleck

11. “The two things that will defeat a lot of young actors are fear of failure and lack of preparation. With acting, I didn’t have a problem with either one – but somehow I didn’t equate either one of them to the academic world.”

— Tom Selleck

12. “There was a time I could have been mistaken for Burt Reynolds. I had a moustache and so did he. But he was the number one star in the world, so there wasn’t really much confusion.”

— Tom Selleck

13. “I haven’t gotten fired from many jobs, but you finish a job and nine times out of ten you’re just unemployed and you don’t know where the next one is. And that does get old. It’s stressful.”

— Tom Selleck

14. “You know I grew up watching the TV series The Rifleman.”

— Tom Selleck

15. “Stand up and pledge with me: A government of the United States is not on the auction block. And America is not for sale!”

— Tom Selleck

16. “Popularity is the pocket change of history. The true measure is courage. There will never be another Charlton Heston.”

— Tom Selleck

17. “I feel the other element of a western is the land, which is very important in this movie. I mean the land is another character in the piece, actually.”

— Tom Selleck

18. “I guess after Dances With Wolves they probably tried some derivative westerns, and if they didn’t work, they said the western is dead and moved on to something else.”

— Tom Selleck

19. “It’s not that conservatives don’t care. We do. We just have different answers than liberals do. It’s a difference of the mind, not of the heart.”

— Tom Selleck

20. “I praise CBS for taking a risk, which is always the price you pay for opportunity. This is not standard movie of the week storytelling. I think movies of the week have fallen into a niche and that isn’t my niche.”

— Tom Selleck

21. “I had a strong, really good upbringing, not puritanical.”

— Tom Selleck

22. “At my age, turning gray is kind of a blessing, where it softens all of the other horrible things it does to you, but it is what it is.”

— Tom Selleck

23. “I’ve never reacted well to other people telling me what to do.”

— Tom Selleck

24. “But, you know there’s a lot of westerns – not that they were bad – it’s just that they can be remade because they’re great stories that aren’t indelible in an audience’s mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.”

— Tom Selleck

25. “It is scary for an actor when you get hired as a lead. No matter what the plot is, it is your job to do something interesting enough to make them want to get inside the lead character’s head.”

— Tom Selleck

26. “I’ve learned by hanging out in Hollywood, where I disagree politically with most people, that most people’s hearts are in the right place, and the only thing we have to argue about is the way to solve the problems.”

— Tom Selleck

27. “I think television has always been one to replicate when something’s successful.”

— Tom Selleck

28. “And besides, because of all she has accomplished, Barbara Jordan has always been a hero of mine.”

— Tom Selleck

29. “The Westerns I like aren’t really comedies. I’m drawn to the scope of them and the land as a central character.”

— Tom Selleck

30. “Which to this day is a source of enormous guilt, because I left with three classes to go in the business school to sign a contract with 20th Century Fox.”

— Tom Selleck

31. “People tracking your life and photographing you anywhere you go, that can make you crazy.”

— Tom Selleck

32. “Television’s grown up a lot. It’s a little more adult, which I think is a good thing. It allows actors to tell more complex stories. I’m happy to see where it ends up.”

— Tom Selleck

33. “All I see is people out there who are hungry for more.”

— Tom Selleck

34. “You don’t do characters that are the same as you, otherwise why bother to act?”

— Tom Selleck

35. “I realized I really liked the screen. I knew it was a challenge, but I wasn’t afraid of risk.”

— Tom Selleck