Sidney Poitier Quotes

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

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

So much of life, it seems, is determined by pure randomness.

~ Sidney Poitier

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

~ Sidney Poitier

I decided in my life that I would do nothing that did not reflect positively on my father's life.

~ Sidney Poitier

I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.

~ Sidney Poitier

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

~ Sidney Poitier

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

~ Sidney Poitier

I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

~ Sidney Poitier

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

~ Sidney Poitier

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