Knute Rockne Quotes

Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.

Show me a good and gracious loser and I will show you a failure.

Four years of football are calculated to breed in the average man more of the ingredients of success in life than almost any academic course he takes. -Knute Rockne

On the road we're somebody else's guests and we play in a way that they're not going to forget we visited them.

One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than a hundred teaching it.

Make the present good, and the past will take care of itself.

Now I'm going to tell you something I've kept to myself for years. None of you ever knew George Gipp. He was long before your time, but you all know what a tradition he is at Notre Dame. And the last thing he said to me, "Rock," he said, "sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock," he said, "but I'll know about it and I'll be happy."

There is a persistent theory, held by those who prate most steadily about "the American way of life" that the average American is a rugged individualist to whom the whole conception of "leadership" is something foreign and distasteful—and this theory would certainly seem to be in accord with our national tradition of lawlessness and disrespect for authority. But it is not entirely consistent with the facts. We Americans are inveterate hero worshipers, to a far greater extent than are the British and the French. We like to personalize our loyalties, our causes. In our political or business or labor organizations, we are comforted by the knowledge that at the top is a Big Boss whom we are free to revere or to hate and upon whom we can depend for quick decisions when the going gets tough. The same is true of our Boy Scout troops and our criminal gangs. It is most conspicuously true of our passion for competitive sport. We are trained from childhood to look to the coach for authority in emergencies. The masterminding coach who can send in substitutes with instructions whenever he feels like it—or even send in an entirely new team—is a purely American phenomenon. In British football the team must play through the game with the same eleven men with which it started and with no orders from the sidelines; if a man is injured and forced to leave the field the team goes on playing with only ten men. In British sport, there are no Knute Rocknes or Connie Macks, whereas in American sport the mastermind is considered as an essential in the relentless pursuit of superiority.

I don't really watch my own old films, unlike Ronald Reagan, who sat in the White House and reran Knute Rockne — All American [1940] again and again. That way madness lies — though I must say, of my own films ...

The history or traditions of a school are a great thing to recite to your team, and to keep before them. Exaggerate these as much as you can.

We’ll have to rent Knute Rockne, All American so you can see who George Gipp was.” “Now you’re showing your age, old man. You don’t rent anymore. You stream.” “Whatever. Ronald Reagan played the Gipper.” “Who’s Ronald Reagan?” she teased.