Quotes from Joe Frazier

I don't think a man has to go around shouting and play-acting to prove he is something. And a real man don't go around putting other guys down, trampling their feelings in the dirt, making out they're nothing.

I had my Olympic gold medal cut up into eleven pieces. Gave all eleven of my kids a piece. It'll come together again when they put me down.

My mom allowed me to take an old burlap bag and fill it with moss, corn stalks and rocks, then hang it from a tree and spend an hour a day punching my heavy bag.

Ali even told me in the ring, 'You can't beat me - I'm your Lord.' I just told him, 'Lord, you're in the wrong place tonight.'

My family's support and the negative environment of the day toward blacks in South Carolina became the forces that led me out of the South - first to New York, then to Philadelphia, where I found opportunity in the form of a PAL gym and my trainer, Yank Durham.

My left eye went when I was young. I was working the speed bag, and some steel went in the eye and scratched it to pieces. I was kinda blind in that eye.

Had my own car at twelve years old. Left school in the tenth grade. Married when I was sixteen. Ain't hard to figure out; I was a man at a very young age.

Courage is how bad you want it.

There are places on a man's head that are as hard as a rock. Your head's actually stronger than your body. And you don't have too many instruments up there workin'. But you got a lot of tools workin' in that body: the liver, the kidneys, the heart, the lungs. You soften that up and see what happens. I lived by the body shot.

I've achieved 'the American dream.' I feel it's my duty to help others achieve their vision, too - especially the youth.

Preaching don't mean you are a true man. You got to go out and do.

Trust me. Sometimes God comes down and puts his hand on you if you're too big in your thoughts.

Twenty years I've been fighting Ali, and I still want to take him apart piece by piece and send him back to Jesus.

This ultimate fighting stuff is something I don't agree with. Once a man is down, you have to let him have a chance to prove how good he is.

The boxing game has been good, so we need to give back. We have to teach young men how to be men.

Work is the only meanin' I've ever known. Like the man in the song says, I just gotta keep on keepin' on.

I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men.

Boxing is the only sport you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.

There are places on a man's head that are as hard as a rock. Your head's actually stronger than your body. And you don't have too many instruments up there workin'.

The way I fight, it's not me beatin' the man. I make the man whip himself.

Ali would not be Ali unless I had come along. Him and me had three fights.

I want to hit him, step away and watch him hurt. I want his heart.

Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.

Work is the only meanin' I've ever known.