Kareem Abdul Jabbar Quotes

You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don’t ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.

One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.

He had breath in him once,” he declared. “He is to be treated with respect, no matter the cost.” “Now is not the time for empty ritual,” Holmes thundered. “Now is precisely the time!” Douglas thundered back. “When we ourselves are empty, it is the ritual that turns us human again.

I always valued my reading skills as highly as I did my basketball skills. In college and in the N.B.A., I read at every opportunity. When age diminished my basketball skills and I retired, I still had everything I'd learned through reading: knowledge of the world and its history, an aptitude for critical thinking and the ability to write.

Pride goeth before destruction,” he quoted, “and a haughty spirit before a fall.

The person unaware of history is like a rudderless boat just floating out in the middle of the ocean, hostages to the waves and currents.

Many people are born into their religion. For them it is mostly a matter of legacy and convenience. Their belief is based on faith, not just in the teachings of the religion but also in the acceptance of that religion from their family and culture. For the person who converts, it is a matter of fierce conviction and defiance. Our belief is based on a combination of faith and logic because we need a powerful reason to abandon the traditions of our families and community to embrace beliefs foreign to both. Conversion is a risky business because it can result in losing family, friends and community support.

You cant win unless you learn how to lose.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

The foolish will tread where the wise will not,” Holmes replied. “If we waited for the wisdom of this venture, Douglas and I would still be in London.” “To fools, then!” Little Huan exclaimed. “To fools!” the others declared.

My opponent now is myself, my inclination toward laziness.

...he tossed that response aside as he Kareem Abdul-Jabbarred an empty pony bottle hook shot crossing the Little are-KAN-zuhz.

If you get yourself too engrossed in things over which you have no control, it’s going to adversely affect the things over which you have control.” His

Don’t hope. Hope is for people who aren’t prepared.

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

You won’t win until you learn how to lose. I don’t like to do it, to lose, but I can stand it. Along with everything else, you have to acquire the ability to accept defeat. No one makes it without stumbling.

Learn from others and never cease trying to be the best you can possibly be...If you get yourself too engrossed in things over which you have no control, it's going to adversely affect the things over which you have control.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and O. J. Simpson have a lot in common. We don’t normally lump them together, because certain key contrasts are tricky — for example, one man is a Muslim intellectual and the other more or less decapitated his ex-wife.

At times when I am feeling low, I hear from a friend and then, My worries start to go away, and I am on the mend. No matter what the doctors say, and their studies never end, The best cure of all, when spirits fall, is a kind word from a friend.

I like to think about that story sometimes because it reminds me that, although we like to think of our heroes as perfect, the harsh truth is that they became heroes by making mistakes and learning from them. To me, that makes them even more heroic.

Racists often take their cues on how to act from the way the government behaves. If the government is actively campaigning against racism, they hide their feelings and do nothing. If the government is indifferent to racism by not prosecuting it, then they feel it’s okay to come out of hiding and attack.

I looked down the line of the wonderfully successful people on either side of me and wondered if each of them had a Coach Wooden who, to quote President Obama, “helped make me who I am.” I hoped so, because without Coach, my life would have been so much less. Less joyous. Less meaningful. Less filled with love. Later,

Coach John Wooden [UCLA] taught me that sports wasn’t just about making us better athletes, but about making us better people. Compassion, kindness, and morality were more important than a championship season. Fame wasn’t an accomplishment, it was an opportunity to show our gratitude to the community that we are a part of by changing it for the better.

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn’t want to be persuaded? The first step is to appreciate that your opponent’s opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” Few of us are immune to this blind spot. That goes for you, and that goes for the two of us as well. And so, as the basketball legend-cum-philosopher Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it, “It’s easier to jump out of a plane—hopefully with a parachute—than it is to change your mind about an opinion.

And a fan. The beauty I see in the arc of a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook or a Kobe Bryant pull-up jumper with the game on the line. Twenty thousand people in the arena all hoping and praying for the same thing to happen like a giant group meditation, the expansion of time when the lightning-fast sprinting slows down into an infinite second. Like a Jimi Hendrix solo or a realized moment by a hundred-year hermetic Himalayan cave monk, all is in the now as electric happiness surges. With all this evil in our world, the cruel violence and prejudices we bring, I can always count on basketball to lift me up. Nothing more reliable on earth than a box score. The personal travails of my tattered heart rise and fall, but the poetry of movement on the hardwood has never failed me, even in the worst of times.

In a paper called “The Economics of ‘Acting White,’” the young black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. argues that some black students “have tremendous disincentives to invest in particular behaviors (i.e., education, ballet, etc.) due to the fact that they may be deemed a person who is trying to act like a white person (a.k.a. ‘selling-out’). Such a label, in some neighborhoods, can carry penalties that range from being deemed a social outcast, to being beaten or killed.” Fryer cites the recollections of a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, known then as Lew Alcindor, who had just entered the fourth grade in a new school and discovered that he was a better reader than even the seventh graders: “When the kids found this out, I became a target. . . . It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything I’d ever been taught was right. I got all A’s and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to be able to deal with the threats. I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide.

I told players at UCLA that we, as a team, are like a powerful car. Maybe a Bill Walton or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Michael Jordan is the big engine, but if one wheel is flat, we’re going no place. And if we have brand new tires but the lug nuts are missing, the wheels come off. What good is the powerful engine now? It’s no good at all.

Douglas wondered if his friend would make it out of this alive. He realized, not for the first time, that life or death was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the mission, their own small attempt to “proclaim liberty to the captives,” as the Book of Isaiah had commanded nearly three thousand years before. To engage in a war where there would be no material benefit for the victor other than the liberation of oppressed and victimized human beings.

I went back two weeks running, then three months after, just to be sure, and then a year after that. So punctual are they that they have trained the local birds to fly in for their breakfast.” Holmes sighed as he took a pull of his Partagás. “Rich or poor, Douglas, we are all creatures of habit.

If there is moral insanity," he said in a conspiratorial whisper, "then there may be the reverse, immoral sanity, if you will, that comes upon one suddenly, like a fever.

They were now forced to graft hardy American vines onto their native plants.

Carmichael’s volkish black nationalism and creation of new values required, as the Black Muslims insisted, shedding a false enslaving identity for a true (i.e., authentic) one rooted in black Africa. This included shedding that most obvious sign of identity, one’s name. So just as Malcolm Little dropped his “slave name” for a simple X, representing his lack of identity in a white racist society, the boxer Cassius Clay reemerged as Muhammad Ali, the basketball star Lew Alcindor as Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and the beat poet LeRoi Jones as Imamu Amiri Baraka (ignoring for the moment that Islamic names reflected an identity imposed by an earlier slave-owning elite, the Arabs). Carmichael himself became Kwame Touré, after two African dictators of the sixties, Sekou Touré of Guinea and Du Bois’s failed Pan-African savior, Kwame Nkrumah.

Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands.

The good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.

twenty percent of all the electricity in the U.S. comes from nuclear energy. That is thanks to Dr. Henry T. Sampson, who invented the gamma electric cell, which makes it possible to convert nuclear radiation into electricity.

In truth, all inventors only improve on what’s come before them. They should be called innovators rather than inventors.

Black Thomas Edison’ because of all his inventions. In fact, Edison even tried to hire Woods. Alexander Graham Bell’s company bought Woods’s ‘telegraphony’ invention.

Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor.

The person who has some awareness of the past knows how to fashion a rudder and which direction land is.

The intellects of the Harlem Renaissance realized that before whites would see blacks as equals, first blacks had to see themselves that way- and not try to pretend to be white or adopt white ideals of beauty.

For some, history is a drab and dusty subject; for me it is a powerful stimulant, arousing our passions about past injustices and infusing us with strength to fight present ones.

neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen

The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.

I'm sending you to Los Angeles, California. They haven't had a superhero there since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired." "What about Shaquille O'Neal?" Melvin asked. "He's not a superhero. He's just very tall.

Racist police, no matter what their rank, have to be weeded from every department and not allowed to work in law enforcement again anywhere.

political backlash has resulted in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country passing laws to make voting more difficult for minority voters. Punishment for raising your voice is to silence that voice.

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

I suppose that, every once in a while, fortune smiles even upon murderers.

I’m an unwavering supporter of labor unions and understand that they are currently in a death struggle with corporate overlords grinding workers’ rights under their tasseled Gucci loafers.

Every step of the way throughout my life as an athlete and activist, I felt my father’s large hand on my shoulder guiding me down a path of service and justice. When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him. -Bayard Rustin

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. —Desmond Tutu2

Despite Coach's admonishment, some of us on the team smoked marijuana. I had been exposed to it back in New York and had occasionally indulged with my friends. At college, though, using it seemed hipper and more of a counterculture statement than just a way of getting high. Plus, it helped with my migraines, which were becoming more frequent.

Regarding faith, my adherence to Islam had not diminished over the years since my conversion, but I had modified it from the intense orthodoxy I had followed at first to a more streamlined version that I felt was more progressive and inclusive. I practiced quietly on my own without the need to proselytize. I had been able to separate my faith in the theology from using it to make a cultural statement about black Americans. My only interest in Islam was spiritual and ethical guidance, not politics. In

Who's the greatest center of all time, Wilt Chamberlain or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Where does Shaquille O'Neal land in the rankings? Would you pick Tim Duncan or Charles Barkley as the better power forward? Who's your best Sixth Man? Where does LeBron James rank among small forwards?

The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.

I wanted young men who wanted to play for UCLA, and not one that I had to talk into playing for UCLA. I always believed that the way to build a great team is to find the kind of people you want to work with and tell them the truth.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come

Don't hope. Hope is for people who aren't prepared.

A Little Fellow Follows Me A careful man I want to be; a little fellow follows me. I do not dare to go astray, for fear he’ll go the self-same way. He thinks that I am big and fine ; Believes in every word of mine. The base in me he must not see; This little chap who follows me. I must be careful as I go; Through summer sun and winter snow. Because I am building, for the years to be; This little chap who follows me. I will always be proud to say that I was one of those little fellows. All seven feet two inches of me.

The lines I’m referring to, Lewis, are that Triumph and Disaster are the same. They’re both impostors because they are momentary. More important is becoming a man of convictions. Lasting joy comes from that.

Popular culture is the vital sign of the spiritual health of a society. How it portrays marginalized people, how it contradicts its own professed values, how it celebrates certain behavior over others, how it imagines fantastic ideas and worlds that never existed—and then strives to bring them into existence. It’s a cauldron of the boiling unconscious that then tries to sieve out the unacceptable.