Sammy Davis, Jr. Quotes

I go to temple a lot less than I would like because when I do, people still look at me as if they think it’s a publicity stunt.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.

During three decades, along all the highways of my youth, Frank had always been there for me.

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

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

You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.

The civil rights movement wasn’t easy for anybody.

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

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

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.

Would it be better if I’d married a Negro woman? Would they treat my child any better? Erect fewer barriers?

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

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.

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.

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.

When Liza Minelli was a child, she used to sit on my lap and call me Uncle Sammy.

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

I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money.

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

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

My home has always been show business.

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.

Though I love the luxury of the Waldorf Towers, room service there doesn’t do soul food.

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

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon‘s urgings for me to go there.

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

There are certain romances that belong in certain cities, in a certain atmosphere, in a certain time.

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

I saw that my image was changing or fading. One of the reasons for taking a break from clubs was to be missed-not forgotten.

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

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

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

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

I didn’t hate being 60 as much as I had 50.

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.