Quotes from Benson Henderson

It's definitely a motivational factor, becoming a three-organization world champion.

It's a very slippery slope when you have a world champion boxer fighting an MMA guy for the sake of money, and he can't knock him out in the first round. He has to make sure he carries him a little bit.

I'm pretty low-key. I'm pretty boring, to be honest.

Fighting is hard, fighting is tough. You get beat up in the body. It's hard; it takes a toll on your body.

You're never going to release the next album and have it be different from your other two, three, four, five albums. People give them a hard time, but it's like, 'I'm an artist, I'm trying to grow. I don't want to have the same album for 10 albums in a row!' Same thing for a martial artist.

You lay the groundwork, stay on the grind, and then eventually you get those big huge national deals with TV stations that are seen worldwide.

We're fighters. Stop worrying about showing up in a fur coat. Get out of here with that.

If a guy's a very good wrestler or a really good boxer or has a really good high kick, you prepare for that. It's the same when you're going to fight someone who talks a lot of crap.

Wrestling was you wrestle in college and you become a high school coach. That was it for wrestlers. We just started to realize there is a legitimate career choice we can choose to use all our wrestling skills we spent our entire lives learning. There is something we can do it now, it's MMA.

By the time I hit 33 I intend on retiring. I'm done after that.

I didn't know that I would be the UFC champion. Did I intend on being the UFC champ? Yeah, absolutely. I didn't exactly see myself doing this as a full time job or career but I certainly intended for it when I started down this path.

Public image can change at the drop of a hat. One person can be a national hero and a month later because he wore the wrong colour he's violently hated so it just all depends.

I was born in Colorado Springs and I spent a lot of time there. I moved to Denver when I first started training in MMA full time.

Our older cousins would help us out. We'd get babysat a lot by some of mum's sisters. They took care of us. But my success in martial arts, getting to be a champion, is down to my mum.

I'm always in the gym, six hours a day. I'm in the gym all the time, six days a week. It's one of the reason why my training camps are a little bit shorter. My training camp is five weeks long because I only need four weeks to get into fighting shape.

When I first started training Tae Kwon Do, it was more just for discipline. My brother and I were two knuckleheads and my mom being a single mother wanted us to get more discipline somewhere other than her yelling at us. But I had no visions at all or aspirations of going from Tae Kwon Do into mixed martial arts.

A lot of my kicks are unique to MMA and the fight game in general. I wouldn't say that it's on purpose, but more because I've had success doing them and using them. I just use them more often.

Sometimes, you go out there and get knocked out in the first seven seconds. That might be one out of 10 times, but that is why we fight.

I'm always trying to add new tricks, work on my fundamentals, and get better and improve.

I lost in my junior year of college in the NAIA national semifinals in 2005 and I'm not over that. I got inside leg tripped by Jake Dieffenbach and failed to go to the national title match. I don't get over things.

You work on you doing your thing, sticking to your game plan, not letting stuff distract you and get you into a danger zone.

The career span for athletes is very short-lived. So you aren't being, perhaps, the smartest person if you don't take care of your family when you're able to.

You try to make your sparring sessions as realistic as possible.

The ability to get sponsors on your own and not have to rely on the amount that Reebok dictates to you was a huge factor. I'd be straight up lying if I said it wasn't a very big part of my decision to go to Bellator.