Quotes from Sammy Davis, Jr.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The one thing you don't want is that stale sound when you've done a line so much you can't find a fresh approach to it. Drop it.

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

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.

Being in public with May and the children was too heavy. I was irreversibly tuned in to everyone around us.

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.

If you want to get known as a singer you hire five sexy chicks and let them fight over you onstage and for the cameras. That's publicity, man.

My handicap? Man, I am a one-eyed, black Jew! That's my handicap!

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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

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

A man is not complete until he has seen the baby he has made.

In terms of addiction, there is nothing more powerful than men's toys.

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.

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.

If you want to be the best, baby, you've got to work harder than anybody else.

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

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