It never bothered me when people would say, ‚You only win championships because you’re playing with Shaq.‘ It bothered me when he said it.

Surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard.

The important thing is that your teammates have to know you’re pulling for them and you really want them to be successful.

I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan, I only want to be Kobe Bryant.

The true competitors, though, are the ones who always play to win.

Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.

That feeling is so intoxicating, walking off the court holding the Larry O’Brien trophy. So I just want to do that again.

I am pretty chill before games. Have a go-to routine that keeps me busy until we are ready to take the court so I’m not just sitting around anxious for the game.

When you are laboring for others let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself.

When I came up to bat with three men on and two outs in the ninth, I looked in the other team’s dugout and they were already in street clothes.

Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.

Baseball hasn’t forgotten me. I go to a lot of old-timers games and I haven’t lost a thing. I sit in the bullpen and let people throw things at me. Just like old times.

Well, I mean, to me, I think my ultimate – my ultimate goal is winning championships and – and I understand that me going down as one of the greats will not happen until I, you know, win a championship.

There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

My job is to play quarterback, and I’m going to do that the best way I know how, because I owe that to my teammates regardless of who is out there on the field with me.

I had practiced with the team, and the first scheduled game was with the University of Missouri. They made it quite clear to the Army that they would not play a team with a black player on it. Instead of telling me the truth, the Army gave me leave to go home.

Of course it would be nice for everybody and myself if we could win but we can still have a personal or a team win if we achieve a target that is effectively a win for us.

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.

You know, you can only lead them from behind.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.

Some people take defeat and losses a certain way. You see how some fighters take losses.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

I always say the strength of democracy lies in criticism. If there is no criticism, that means there is no democracy. And if you want to grow, you must invite criticism. And I want to grow; I want to invite criticism.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

With the NBA’s dress code, I had to revamp my wardrobe a little bit. They call it ‚business casual.‘ You have to wear dress jeans or dress slacks, with a collared shirt or sweater. And you can’t wear athletic shoes.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

A lot of people tell me a lot of things about my conduct, my game, my future… but I try to stay away from their words of wisdom. I don’t let it distract me. On the field, you will be facing the ball alone. If you fail, you will the only one to blame. So, you should be the one deciding for yourself.

March is a month without mercy for rabid basketball fans. There is no such thing as a ‚gentleman gambler‘ when the Big Dance rolls around. All sheep will be fleeced, all fools will be punished severely… There are no Rules when the deal goes down in the final weeks of March. Even your good friends will turn into monsters.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

You must keep raising this game to higher and higher levels, as on the pool table – mastering eventually the psychological angles. Your playing is a pleasure, all the way to the end, to death, when the game is over.

I think we understand that for the Court to work well, we have to not only respect but genuinely like each other.

My game is really played above time. I don’t say that like I’m saying I’m ahead of my time. I’m saying, like, if I’m on the court and I throw a pass, the ball that I’ve thrown will lead my teammate right where he needs to go, before he even knows that that’s the right place to go to.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

I had talked to a lot of people in Golden State’s front offices before the draft. They said they liked me, but they had a lot of guards, so I didn’t think that I would end up there.

I’ll do whatever it takes to win games, whether it’s sitting on a bench waving a towel, handing a cup of water to a teammate, or hitting the game-winning shot.

As long as I stay in training and play well, I don’t see what objection there can be to what I do off the field.

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

I don’t think anyone ever plans to change line-ups, but it’s something that comes with being in bands. I was in a band once and there were always problems – members come and go – and some of the world’s biggest bands have changed line-ups loads!

What we achieve individually is important but it’s never ever more than the team does.

For more than a decade, I led an organization that put on an elaborate Christmas program each December. It was a big production, with over 250 people participating in more than 20 performances. By the end of the season, everyone who participated was exhausted.

We’re African-American and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

I won’t have to do any major changes to continue my career a long way, hopefully. Just hopefully stay healthy and be able to help a team out as I go through and still play at a pretty high level.

The only thing wrong with the NBA – or any other professional sport, for that matter – is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president… is morally treasonable to the American public.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.

I won at every level – all the way since I started playing the game of basketball at nine. I’ve won at every level, won championships at every level. And, you know, it won’t be fulfilled until I win at the highest level.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

I don’t feel I’ve had a decent critic ever on the East coast.

I’ve never fought with anyone. A lot of people talk to me, and they’re like, ‚Oh, you would have been fighting all the time when you were younger,‘ but I’m like, ‚I never fought with anyone because I always knew that if I hurt myself, I might lose important time in my cricket career,‘ so I never got into any fight, ever in my life.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn’t happen 20 years ago.

The amount of trust and bandwidth that you build up working with someone for five, seven, 10 years? It’s just awesome. I care about openness and connectedness in a global sense.

I’ve had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, ‚Your music sucks, you don’t know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don’t know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.‘

It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.

There’s a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.

The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.

In an individual sport, yes, you have to win titles. Baseball’s different. But basketball, hockey? One person can control the tempo of a game, can completely alter the momentum of a series. There’s a lot of great individual talent.

No cricket team in the world depends on one or two players. The team always plays to win.