“The will to succeed is important, but what’s more important is the will to prepare.”
― Bobby Knight
“I think that we as a people are always prone to think about, well, tomorrow will be a better day. Well, why will it be a better day? And I think the more that we believe in doing things better, doing the right thing rather than hoping that that’s going to happen, let’s make it happen.”
― Bobby Knight
“People change over the years, and that changes situations for good and for bad.”
― Bobby Knight
“I think a great idea would be involving our various military services along the border all the way from San Diego to Houston. We’ve got military bases all over the country. We can just move some people down there and let those cartels who are doing a lot of hurt to the youth of America, let those cartels fight against the Marine Corps.”
― Bobby Knight
“The key is not the will to win… everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.”
― Bobby Knight
“If I were involved with the NBA, I wouldn’t want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I’ve been watching on another team, and now he’s 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid.”
― Bobby Knight
“I watched the guy that hits a home run, and he comes across the plate and he points skyward, like thanking for the help from the Almighty to hit the home run. And as he does that, I say to myself, ‘God screwed the pitcher.’ And I don’t know how else you look at it.”
― Bobby Knight
“When my time on earth is gone, and my activities here are passed, I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass!”
― Bobby Knight
“Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.”
― Bobby Knight
“My dad was a very quiet person, and unbelievably tough. But my grandmother gave me my first look at negative thinking to bring about positive results. When I was just a little guy, anytime I came to my grandmother and said I wish for this or that, Grandma would say, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’”
― Bobby Knight
“When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was ‘It will be O.K.’ I would wonder, ‘How the hell is it going to be O.K.?’ The worst word in the English language is ‘hope.’”
― Bobby Knight
“If we want the best pitcher, let’s get Bobby Feller. If want the best football player, let’s get Jimmy Brown; the best basketball player, let’s get Bill Russell. If we want the guy who can do the best job for the United States – let’s get Donald Trump.”
― Bobby Knight
“I want to say to you Indiana people that I owe you a big, big debt of gratitude because nowhere in the world is a sporting group followed more than this state follows basketball. And I just want to thank you for the opportunity that I had to coach in this state – it will always be something that I will cherish.”
― Bobby Knight
“I don’t think I have ever been out of control.”
― Bobby Knight
“All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average. What I did was bring that kid in at 5:00 in the morning, and he would run the stairs from the bottom to the top until I told him to quit.”
― Bobby Knight
“Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they’ll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I’m sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.”
― Bobby Knight
“A big part of teaching is being emphatic. Maybe I’m right or wrong, but part of my approach was that when I said something, the kids understood exactly what I meant and what I wanted.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been around anybody that wanted to win more or worked harder than Michael Jordan.”
― Bobby Knight
“When somebody asks about the greatest players in history, I start with Bill Russell. More than the best player is the MVP, and the MVP in the history of team sports is Bill Russell.”
― Bobby Knight
“As I’ve said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators – not recently – fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.”
― Bobby Knight
“Walking has been ridiculous in college basketball the past 15 years.”
― Bobby Knight
“You don’t play against opponents, you play against the game of basketball.”
― Bobby Knight
“Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.”
― Bobby Knight
“All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.”
― Bobby Knight
“And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit.”
― Bobby Knight
“I don’t intend to retire.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’m an unemployed teacher right now and I’m looking for a place to teach.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’ve never predicted anything. All I have ever said is, that we will do the very best we can.”
― Bobby Knight
“If I came in to recruit your son, I would tell you, your wife, and your son, that I will be the most demanding coach your son can play for.”
― Bobby Knight
“Well, I think it’s pretty much established that I just didn’t have any interest in coaching in the pros.”
― Bobby Knight
“I don’t have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.”
― Bobby Knight
“Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?”
― Bobby Knight
“During my 40-year coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech, my teams reached the Final Four on five occasions, winning the national championship three times.”
― Bobby Knight
“As his team prepares, a coach’s entire being must be concentrated on winning games.”
― Bobby Knight
“I have always maintained that in basketball the importance of the mental to the physical is about four to one.”
― Bobby Knight
“I enjoyed needling the press. If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t have done it. Writers have rarely played, so as a coach, you have antagonistic feelings about some guy writing up the story of the game who’s never even attempted to play it.”
― Bobby Knight
“I think that it’s perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don’t want defeat. We don’t want defeat in sport. We don’t want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What’s going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?”
― Bobby Knight
“I’ve always felt that, you know, the Almighty has a lot of things to do other than help my basketball team.”
― Bobby Knight
“What the hell is a Republican? What the hell is a Democrat? I don’t care. I’ve always urged people to make sure you vote for the right guy.”
― Bobby Knight
“I don’t think that political history is full of a whole lot of tremendously honest people. I have never found any fault about that as far as Mr. Trump is concerned in my relationship with him.”
― Bobby Knight
“I just like the United States, and I like being an American.”
― Bobby Knight
“I think what Mr. Trump has is this – he has experiences. He has put more things together in businesses around the United States, around the world. And he’s had some things that didn’t go exactly right. He’s been able to find a way to resurrect those things. He’s been able to make some changes.”
― Bobby Knight
“I was a history and government major at Ohio State University, and I’ve spent a lot of time just fiddling around with who the next president’s going to be, over the years, or who would I like to see in that job, or whatever. And I’ve come to believe, without any reservation, in this era, the best-prepared person for this job by far is Donald Trump.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’m a teacher. My mother was a teacher. I spent 40 years as a teacher.”
― Bobby Knight
“Harry Truman, with what he did in dropping and having the guts to drop the bomb in 1944, saved – saved millions of American lives.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’ll tell you one thing about Donald Trump: There will never be a Benghazi in a Donald Trump administration.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’m tired of this party stuff, where we’re going to do what’s right for this party, or we’re going to do what’s right for that party. Let’s just get together and do what’s right for the country. I think that’s what all of us want.”
― Bobby Knight
“Probably nobody in America has come close to setting up as many jobs for people with his business as Donald Trump has.”
― Bobby Knight
“We need a Donald Trump more than we’ve ever needed anybody since George Washington.”
― Bobby Knight
“I don’t think my dad ever raised his voice to my mother or to me, ever.”
― Bobby Knight
“From my mother to people that I’ve known in my lifetime, they’ve tried to settle me down a little bit. Now I’m trying to do the same thing to my man Trump.”
― Bobby Knight
“Trump is not national: he’s international. He’s known all over the world. He has established businesses all over, and he has given jobs to thousands and thousands of people all over the world with these businesses that he has put together.”
― Bobby Knight
“Everybody has an opportunity in America. I don’t care if guys whine and complain about this or that. You know, no country affords its inhabitants the opportunities that the U.S.A. gives to its people.”
― Bobby Knight
“I learned at an early stage that the most important thing I could do for my players was to give them the tools necessary to beat their opponent.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’ve always been a great fan of the state of Pennsylvania. One of the people – one of the people that I admired the most in college athletics was Joe Paterno.”
― Bobby Knight
“There are two real keys to winning. You’ve got to have good players: no coach won with bad players. You win with good players. That is number one. Number two is, when we are playing, let’s say we are playing Michigan, and they had a really good press: we’ve got to solve that press.”
― Bobby Knight
“I don’t understand the NBA in that, each time they bring in a one-and-done kid, they have to release a veteran player on a roster. I don’t understand why their players association condones that.”
― Bobby Knight
“From my standpoint, I would make it very difficult on the NBA to even have any association with college basketball. I think it’s ludicrous the way they take kids away that are certainly not prepared to play.”
― Bobby Knight
“I’m not sure what a conservative is. I don’t know whether a conservative is a guy that goes to bed too early or maybe doesn’t sleep long enough or just what the hell he might be. I don’t know. Maybe he’s a guy that – you know, he just wants to be real quiet.”
― Bobby Knight
“I don’t know what a conservative is, you know, but I do know what good people are. And that’s where I sit with Donald Trump.”
― Bobby Knight
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