Mike Tyson Quotes

Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth

Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.

Everyone that you fight is not your enemy and everyone who helps you is not your friend.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.

Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.

Man is not mean to be humble, he's meant to be humbled.

In America, we’re really good at blowing things up but not so good in knowing where the pieces will land.

Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth. —Mike Tyson

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you. Like a snowball on a hill, you can pick it up and throw it or do anything you want with it before it starts rolling down, but once it rolls down and gets so big, it’ll crush you to death. So one must never allow fear to develop and build up without having control over it, because if you don’t you won’t be able to achieve your objective or save your life.

The ability to apply the discipline, the ability to do what needs to be done no matter how he feels inside, in my opinion, is the definition of a true professional.

Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.

My style was impetuous, my defenses were impregnable, and I was ferocious.

Everybody thinks this is a tough man’s sport. This is not a tough man’s sport. This is a thinking man’s sport. A tough man is gonna get hurt real bad in this sport.

(Quoting Cus D'Amato) Discipline is doing what you hate to do, but do it like you love it.

Bloody Mike Tyson'd have trouble with you.

You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

The ones who lost and quit, well their demons will follow them to their grave because they had a chance to face them and they didn’t. You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity.

Your mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with your mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is ninety percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit.

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading

Superstition dictates you can't ever describe a shift as 'quiet'. Much like you don't say 'good luck' to an actor or 'go fuck yourself' to Mike Tyson.

Thing is, as ye git aulder, this character-deficiency gig becomes mair sapping. Thir wis a time ah used tae say tae aw the teachers, bosses, dole punters, poll-tax guys, magistrates, when they telt me ah was deficient:'Hi, cool it, gadge, ah'm jist me, jist intae a different sort ay gig fae youse but, ken?' Now though, ah've goat tae concede thit mibee they cats had it sussed. Ye take a healthier slapping the aulder ye git. The blows hit hame mair. It's like yon Mike Tyson boy at the boxing, ken? Every time ye git it thegither tae make a comeback, thir's jist a wee bit mair missin. So ye fuck up again. Yip, ah'm jist no a gadge cut oot fir modern life n that's aw thir is tae it, man. Sometimes the gig goes smooth, then ah jist pure panic n it's back tae the auld weys. What kin ah dae?

The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind.

Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you.

God is not going to send someone to hell for my mistakes. So God and I have to deal with my own salvation.

Mike tyson made a prolific quote that I will never forget. It came when he was being interviewed by a reporter about another boxers plan for an upcoming fight... Mike said, "Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face.

I love my mother. My mother loves my dad. Those two facts are undeniable. I want my father to live. I want him to fight to live as long as he can. My mother wants to let him pass. She does not want him suffering anymore. She says that I am not there in the middle of the night at home, when he begs her to let him die. I say that he should not be taking the medicine that the doctor is prescribing, that it made Mike Tyson want to eat his opponents young.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

God, it would be good to be a fake somebody rather than a real nobody.

the great philosopher Mike Tyson once put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Mike Tyson, who, reflecting on the collapse of his fortune and fame, told a reporter, “If you’re not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.

Confidence was everything. But in order to possess that confidence, you had to test yourself and put yourself on the line. It doesn’t come from osmosis, out of the air. It comes from consistently going over the visualization in your mind to help you develop the confidence that you want to possess.

MIKE WOULD LIKE TO THANK: Cus D’Amato, my mentor, friend, and general. Because of you, my life has reached heights I could never have imagined. Without you, I don’t know where I would be today. My gratitude to you is immeasurable.

The way that you direct your imagination is by repeating a simple affirmation. “‘EVERY DAY, IN EVERY WAY, I AM GETTING BETTER AND BETTER.’ This

Cus talked with such enthusiasm because enthusiasm is contagious and people will do things when they get enthused.

I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. My style was impetuous, my defenses were impregnable, and I was ferocious.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Freedom is a very dangerous thing. We ration it very closely.

He was very vindictive and always out for revenge. He couldn’t live without enemies, so he created them.

One day Cus came to me. “You know, Camille really wants you to do your chores. I could care less if you did, but you should do them because it will make you a better boxer.” “How’s taking out the trash going to make me a better boxer?” I scoffed. “Because doing something you hate to do like you love it is good conditioning for someone aspiring towards greatness.

Sur un même ring de boxe sont réunis Mike Tyson, le champion du monde en titre des poids lourds, et un chômeur bengali sous-alimenté. Que disent les ayatollahs du dogme néolibéral ? Justice est assurée, puisque les gants de boxe des deux protagonistes sont de même facture, le temps du combat égal pour eux, l'espace de l'affrontement unique, et les règles du jeu constantes. Alors que le meilleur gagne ! L'arbitre impartial, c'est le marché. L'absurdité du dogme néolibéral saute aux yeux. (p. 193)

Some students would make fun of me, but nobody fucked with me.

What if I failed and lost? I had been in a million fights on the streets

Because doing something you hate to do like you love it is good conditioning for someone aspiring towards greatness.

Don’t use that word ‘can’t.’ You can’t say ‘can’t.

There are animals disguised as human beings out here, you are not sophisticated enough to decipher the two." Cus D'Amato

I had been reading Nietzsche and thought I was a Superman. I could barely spell my name but I was a Superman.

Hammerle began to ask her about the improbabilities that he saw about the case. “Look, you met Mike Tyson, and you saw him making all of these passes

Boxing great Mike Tyson said “a happy fighter is a dangerous fighter.” I think he’s right.

(Ear cartilage is similarly underserved by the vascular system, so if you plan on picking a fight with Mike Tyson, do practice good wound toilet.)

Friendship is an intercourse of world. Mike Tyson became a friend of “Cus” D’Amato, and it took him from fighting on the street and going to prison to fighting in a ring for money.

I was never taught how to handle my celebrity status. I don’t tell kids it’s right to be Mike Tyson. Parents serve as better role models.

He remembered something Mike Tyson had said: once the punching starts, strategy goes out the window.

The boxer-philosopher Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” As we wander through life, what punches us in the face repeatedly is our environment.

No one has ever said this better than Mike Tyson, who, reflecting on the collapse of his fortune and fame, told a reporter, “If you’re not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.” If

He remembered something Mike Tyson had said: once the punching starts, strategy goes out the window. The apple cart is tipping, but it hasn't turned over. Best to hang. See who's still standing once the punching is over.

and groaned. And Tate, saint that he is, just sighed and helped Rachel stand up, wrapping an arm around her waist to keep her steady as their sad little group moved towards the exit. "Okay Mike Tyson, let's go." He turned to Casey

Sometimes we’re so desperate for greatness and what we believe greatness can give us in return that we bypass people’s generosity. We’re not generous to people. We’re not caring to people. Instead, we’re so selfish to grasp success because we believe our lives will be better once we succeed. But once you do become successful, that rarely happens.

In her book, Robin implied that we hadn’t slept together, but I actually nailed her the first or second night when she came to my hotel. Instead she claimed that we strolled through the mall and played with puppies at pet shops for hours. Can you see me in a motherfucking mall, the heavyweight champ of the world? What the fuck am I doing in a mall?

Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you. Like a snowball on a hill, you can pick it up and throw it or do anything you want with it before it starts rolling down, but once it rolls down and gets so big, it’ll crush you to death. So one must never allow fear to develop and build up without having control over it, because if you don’t you won’t be able to achieve your objective or save your life. “Consider

Burning cocaine is the worst smell in the world. It smells like burning plastic and rat poison combined. A friend of mine once told me, that when you want to know something about anything, put some fire under it. The fire brings out everything. You want to know something about a motherfucker? Put some fire under his ass. Well, when you put some fire under that cocaine, you know what it's made out of.

I followed the changes I’d made to my body by working to strengthen my mind. I was devouring books. A lot of self-help, inspirational stuff. Tony Robbins. Deepak Chopra. Malcolm Gladwell. James Allen. The biographies of Pimp C. and Jimi Hendrix. Mike Tyson’s autobiography.

The ability to do what needs to be done regardless of the pressure and do it with poise, with no reflection of his inner feeling or conflict if it exists, is what makes a professional. It has nothing to do with their knowledge. I’ll show you many amateurs with far superior knowledge and ability than top professionals.

At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. Life is totally about losing everything.

Sometimes I get in my head and I think I am somebody, and I am easily offended. When I know I am nobody, I can never be offended.

I want to rip out his heart and feed it to Lennox Lewis. I want to kill people. I want to rip their stomachs out and eat their children.

If you are not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.

Later in that tape, the dispatcher kept telling Desiree that she was the victim, she was the victim, and then Desiree slipped something very interesting in.

Be humble. For the world will force humbleness upon you.

Man is not meant to be humble, he’s meant to be humbled.

I came home one day and there was a white baby in the house. What the fuck is this shit? I thought.

As long as I am breathing, your legacy will continue to live on. Our

Damn, why couldn’t I have been with a nonconfrontational kind of white guy?

My disadvantage was my advantage.

No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.

What kind of bird don’t fly? Jailbird! Jailbird!

If you don’t have the spiritual warrior in you, you’ll never be a fighter.

Cus was a strong believer that in your mind you had to be the entity that you wanted to be. If you wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, you had to

nadir.

People who are only interested in having fun cannot accomplish anything.” I thought I was stronger than people who were weak and partying.

If a person gets up after the fall, it’s not physics, but character.

There are animals disguised as human beings out here, you are not sophisticated enough to decipher the two.

Everybody has a plan till they get hit in the mouth. (P.s.) I think this extends beyond boxing as well.

You can't give kids a fighting chance if you don't give them a fighting mind.

Cus told me that to be a great fighter you had to get out of your head. He would have me sit down and he’d say, “Transcend. Focus. Relax until you see yourself looking at yourself. Tell me when you get there.

But, sir, please let me finish this round and go one more round. That’s what we normally do,” I pleaded. I wanted to impress Cus. I guess I had. When we got out of the ring, Cus’s first words to Bobby were, “That’s the heavyweight champion of the world.

ITEM. Eleven women from the Miss Black America Pageant all claimed Mike Tyson touched them on their rears. So the founder of the pageant filed a $607 million lawsuit against Mike Tyson. Several of the contestants eventually admitted they had lied in the hope of getting publicity and cashing in on the award money.49 Think about it. If each woman had the potential for being awarded $20 to $30 million, aren’t we really bribing women to make false accusations? And the Miss Black America Pageant itself got more publicity than it had received in its history. The lawsuit made tabloid headlines; the dropping of the lawsuit was buried in the back pages. When we fail to give as much attention to an accusation being false as to the original accusation, the accused is left with an image problem. When this image problem was added to Tyson’s already tarnished image, Tyson was doubtless more likely to be found guilty when one of the Miss Black America contestants (Desiree Washington) accused him of date rape than he would have if tabloid headlines had recently been saying “Black Beauties Bribed by Big Bucks.

The moment the bell rings, and you come in contact with each other, suddenly your opponent seems like everybody else, because now your imagination has dissipated. The fight itself is the only reality that matters. You have to learn to impose your will and take control over that reality.

the firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions. And while all this might seem of purely academic interest, it could prove helpful when your partner breaks his leg at 19,000 feet in a blizzard on a Peruvian mountain. It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They’re afraid, too, but they’re not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, said, “Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your

used to watch these comic book characters on TV, the X-Men and one of my favorites, Apocalypse. Apocalypse would say, “I’m not malevolent, I just am.” Cayton and Jacobs wanted me to be friendly with everybody, sociable, but I knew a man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.

Tyson came in with a lot of excess baggage. The press has vilified him. Not a day goes by that the press doesn’t bring up his faults. This is not the Tyson I know. The Tyson I know is a sensitive, thoughtful, caring man. He may be terrifying in the ring, but that ends when he leaves the ring.

It is common knowledge but uncommonly practised, that what you think is what you are. A fighter is the sum of his thoughts that occupy his mind on a daily basis. If a fighter decides to actively allow negative thoughts to run rampant in his mind, he will be operating from a negative mental zone.

If I hide the cuffs, then I’m a bitch. Jim thought that hiding my cuffs would stop me from experiencing shame, but that would have been the shame. I had to be seen with that steel on me. Fuck everybody else, the people who understand, they have got to see me with that steel on. I was going to warrior school.

We sat down and Cus told me he couldn’t believe I was only thirteen years old. And then he told me what my future would be. He had seen me spar for not even six minutes, but he said it in a way that was like law. “You looked splendid,” he said. “You’re a great fighter.” It was compliment after compliment. “If you listen to me, I can make you the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.

You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does. “Your mind is not your friend, Mike. I hope you know that. You have to fight with your mind, control it, put it in its place. You have to control your emotions. Fatigue in the ring is ninety percent psychological. It’s just the excuse of a man who wants to quit.

Cus asked Steve to leave the room so he could talk to me in private. That’s when he told me he was dying from pneumonia. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He didn’t look morbidly ill. He was buffing. He had energy and zest. He was eating ice cream. He was chilling out, but I started freaking out. “I don’t want to do this shit without you,” I said, choking back tears. “I’m not going to do it.” “Well, if you don’t fight, you’ll realize that people can come back from the grave, because I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.” I told him “Okay,” and then he took my hand. “The world has to see you, Mike. You’re going to be champ of the world, the greatest out there,

45. No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy No matter how well you have prepared for something in advance - whether it’s an expedition, an exam, a marriage or a race - when you find yourself in the thick of the action, however good your plan, things happen. Adventure is unpredictable, and you had better learn to be flexible and to swing with the punches, or you will get beaten - it’s as simple as that. Mike Tyson famously once said: ‘Everyone has a plan…until they get punched in the face!’ If the adventure is an exciting one, you can bet your bottom dollar you will get hit by the occasional punch in the face. So prepare for the unexpected, and remember that forewarned is forearmed. Knowing that things will and do go wrong in the heat of battle is actually half the battle. It means that when it happens you are ready for it - you can react fast, stay nimble and you can survive the barrage. We used to say in the military that when things took a turn for the worse you have to ‘improvise, adapt and overcome.’ IAO. It is a good one to remember. It gives us a road map to deal with the unexpected. Being caught out, being caught off guard often makes people freeze - it is a human reaction to shock. But freezing can cost you the edge. So learn to anticipate the unexpected, and when it happens, smile to yourself and treat it as a solid marker that you are doing something right on your road to success. If nothing ever goes wrong then you haven’t been ambitious enough! I also like to say that the real adventure begins in earnest when things go a little bit wrong. It is only then that you get to pit yourself against the worst the wild has to throw at you. When all is going to plan, with all the kit working perfectly and the weather benign, then it isn’t really a test of character. It is easy to be the hero when all is going your way. But when it all goes wrong and life feels like a battle, it is then that we can see what sort of people we have around us. It is only through the hardships that our character becomes forged. Without struggle there can be no growth - physically or emotionally. So embrace the unexpected, feed off it, train yourself to be a master of the curve ball, and you will have built yourself another solid ‘character’ rung on the ladder to success.