quotations about boxing
The hardest thing about prize-fighting is picking up your teeth with a boxing glove.
KIN HUBBARD
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
Every major prizefight is like a morality play, a John Wayne movie, a Horatio Alger novel. There's a good guy and a bad guy.
JAMES MURRAY
"10 Great Quotes from Boxing", Chicago Now, June 9, 2015
When you saw me in the boxing ring fighting, it wasn't just so I could beat my opponent. My fighting had a purpose. I had to be successful in order to get people to listen to the things I had to say.
MUHAMMAD ALI
The Soul of a Butterfly
To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.
JACK HANDEY
Deep Thoughts
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
On Boxing
Getting hit motivates me. It makes me punish the guy more. A fighter takes a punch, hits back with three punches.
ROBERTO DURAN
attributed, Current Biography Yearbook: 1980
If there's magic in boxing, it's the magic of fighting battles beyond endurance, beyond cracked ribs, ruptured kidneys and detached retinas. It's the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you.
PAUL HAGGIS
Million Dollar Baby
I love boxing and it did a lot for me. But sometimes it made me think how savage human beings could be to each other. That wasn't the kind of boxer I wanted to be. My strategy was to be as scientific as I could when I fought. I didn't want to be seriously hurt, and I didn't want to do that to anybody else either.
MUHAMMAD ALI
The Soul of a Butterfly
Float like a butterfly! Sting like a bee! Rumble, young man! Rumble! Waaa!
MUHAMMAD ALI
The Greatest: My Own Story
Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
On Boxing
Boxing is a sport at its most brutal, most primitive, and most natural. Two men defending their honor and courage, in a ring surrounded by observers, whose love for the sport is essentially spiritual. Boxing is the last refuge of the modern day warror.
THOMAS DONELSON
Viewing Boxing from Ringside
Unlike any other sport, the objective in boxing is chillingly simple: One man purposefully endeavors to inflict bodily harm on another man.
HOWARD COSELL
I Never Played the Game
Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.
ROGER KAHN
"Intellectuals and Ball Players,", American Scholar, Nov. 3, 1957
It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
MUHAMMAD ALI
BBC Sport, Jan. 17, 2007
Boxing is just show business with blood.
FRANK BRUNO
London Guardian, Nov. 19, 1991
Boxing is the best and most individual lifestyle you can have in society without being a criminal.
RANDY NEWMAN
attributed, "10 Great Quotes from Boxing", Chicago Now, June 9, 2015
I'm a fighter. I believe in the eye-for-an-eye business. I'm no cheek turner. I got no respect for a man who won't hit back. You kill my dog, you better hide your cat.
MUHAMMAD ALI
The Greatest: My Own Story
When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him.
MIKE TYSON
Sports Illustrated, Mar. 1988
Boxing is the sport to which all other sports aspire.
GEORGE FOREMAN
attributed, The Ontario Review, 1986
I hated the sight on TV of big, clumsy, lumbering heavyweights plodding, stalking each other like two Frankenstein monsters, clinging, slugging toe to toe. I knew I could do it better ... circle, dance, shuffle, hit and move ... make an art out of it.
MUHAMMAD ALI
attributed, Book of African-American Quotations