Top 35 Sammy Davis, Jr. Quotes

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

Marilyn and I were rumored to be an item. We were friends. Nothing more. Marilyn was one of the sweetest creatures that ever lived.

The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.

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.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I wasn’t anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.

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

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

Real success is not on the stage, but off the stage as a human being, and how you get along with your fellow man.

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.

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

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

You don’t swing where you sleep.

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.

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

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

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.

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

All I really had was my talent. Without that I wouldn’t be welcome at the White House.

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

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

My home has always been show business.

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

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

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

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

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

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.

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