Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

I try to do the right thing at the right time. They may just be little things, but usually they make the difference between winning and losing.

I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court.

I would suggest that teachers show their students concrete examples of the negative effects of the actions that gangsta rappers glorify.

If not for the success that medicine has made, I might be part of a much different story right now.

I am highly offended by the total lack of acknowledgement of my contribution to Laker success.

Sports and entertainment are the only places where inner-city kids see themselves being able to succeed. Their intellectual development is something they don't relate to.

You can't win unless you learn how to lose.

What I have is P.H. positive chronic myeloid leukemia, which is an aberration in your white blood cells.

When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. That's a terrible burden.

In athletics there's always been a willingness to cheat if it looks like you're not cheating. I think that's just a quirk of human nature.

Music is really something that makes people whole.

Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they're also practicing math.

My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay.

I hope to be involved in a successful movie script.

I have been coaching recently. I coached high school basketball in Arizona, and I hope that more opportunities become available.

I didn't really seek attention. I just wanted to play the game well and go home.

This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher.

I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.

Black people don't have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted.

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.