Sammy Davis, Jr.

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Bogart could have been color blind. He got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.”

“The success of the Rat Pack or the Clan was due to the camaraderie, the three guys who work together and kid each other and love each other.”

“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.”

“The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.”

“I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“When you lose a lover it's like getting a bad haircut. It grows back in time.”

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

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

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

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