I Am Not Sidney Poitier Quotes & Sayings

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it. — Sidney Poitier

Our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things. — Sidney Poitier

Have you ever heard of 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?' I would like to play Sidney Poitier's role - I love that role. — Keith Stanfield

I wanted to look at them because I feel, internally, that I am an ordinary person who has had an extraordinary life. — Sidney Poitier

I've learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. 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. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness. — Sidney Poitier

But I always had the ability to say no. That's how I called my own shots. — Sidney Poitier

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

Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era. — Wesley Morris

I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it. — Sidney Poitier

I am not a hugely religious person, but I believe that there is a oneness with everything. And because there is this oneness, it is possible that my mother is the principal reason for my life. — Sidney Poitier

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

Sidney Poitier, who is class personified, said: 'Lou, you're a leading man because you're a good actor.' Brought tears to my eyes. — Lou Diamond Phillips

When I was growing up, I didn't see me in the movies except in certain lesser roles. If it wasn't funny, I wasn't there. Then Sidney Poitier came along, and he wasn't funny. He was just good. There's me. So that was my pattern. — Morgan Freeman

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections. — Sidney Poitier

If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things-you feel that after death, you will be no more. — Sidney Poitier

I took one thing to heart that I heard from Sidney Poitier in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And it resonated so much with me. He says: 'Dad, you always looked at yourself as a black man. I look at myself as a man.' — Dennis Haysbert

White people found that freedom was indeed indivisible. We had kept saying in the dark days of apartheid's oppression that white South Africans would never be truly free until we blacks were free as well. Many thought it was just another Tutu slogan, irresponsible as all his others had been. Today they were experiencing it as a reality. I used to refer to an intriguing old film The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier was one of the stars. Two convicts escape from a chain gang. They are manacled together, the one white, the other black. They fall into a ditch with slippery sides. The one convict claws his way nearly to the top and out of the ditch but cannot make it because he is bound to his mate, who has been left at the bottom in the ditch. The only way they can make it is together as they strive up and up and up together and eventually make their way over the side wall and out. — Desmond Tutu

There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It's everywhere. — Sidney Poitier

A Murphy [Eddie Murphy] movie is like a Sidney Poitier comedy - he's that intensely good ... He revolutionized acting. He's literally black Brando. Before Eddie Murphy, there were two schools of acting for a black actor: Either you played it LIKE THIS or youplayeditlahkdis. He was the first black guy in a movie to talk like I am talking right now. That did not exist for black actors before him. — Scott Raab

I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was ... a human being. — Sidney Poitier

To be compared to Jackie Robinson is an enormous compliment, but I don't think it's necessarily deserved. — Sidney Poitier

I started with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and Lou Gossett, Jr. and the rest of the wonderful cast of 'A Raisin In The Sun.' We were directed by the great Lloyd Richards. The play was written by the wonderful Lorraine Hansberry, and it was produced by Phil Rose. That's where my start was, so ... not a bad way to start. — Glynn Turman

My father was the quintessential husband and dad. — Sidney Poitier

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. 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

A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better. — Sidney Poitier

If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't. — Sidney Poitier

You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are. — Sidney Poitier

To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed. — Sidney Poitier

But my dad also was a remarkable man, a good person, a principled individual, a man of integrity. — Sidney Poitier

Every new fashion is a form of rebellion. — Sidney Poitier

You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were. — Sidney Poitier

Every film by Will Smith, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Don Cheadle will have great acting and carry good messages in the film. The films starring those actors are the films I tell young people to watch for good acting and to view for quality movies. — Brian J. White

In America, it is difficult to be your own man. — Sidney Poitier

I want people to say at the end of my day, you know, like I used to say about Sidney Poitier and James Cagney and Joan Crawford and Red Skelton and those guys and Bill Cosby. They did quality and substance. You always remember them. — Bernie Mac

So I had to be careful. I recognized the responsibility that, whether I liked it or not, I had to accept whatever the obligation was. That was to behave in a manner, to carry myself in such a professional way, as if there ever is a reflection, it's a positive one. — Sidney Poitier