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Sidney Poitier Quotes

Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE is a Bahamian-American actor, film director, author and diplomat.

In 1964, Poitier became the first Bahamian and first black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role in Lilies of the Field. The significance of these achievements was bolstered in 1967, when he starred in three successful films, all of which dealt with issues involving race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, making him the top box-office star of that year. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Poitier among the Greatest Male Stars of classic Hollywood cinema, ranking 22nd on the list of 25.

Poitier has directed a number of films, including A Piece of the Action, Uptown Saturday Night, Let's Do It Again, with Bill Cosby; Stir Crazy, starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder; and Ghost Dad, also with Cosby. In 2002, thirty-eight years after receiving the Best Actor Award, Poitier was chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Academy Honorary Award, in recognition of his "remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being".

Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. From 1997 to 2007, he served as the non-resident Bahamian ambassador to Japan. On August 12, 2009, Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama. In 2016, he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding lifetime achievement in film.

✵ 20. February 1927
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Sidney Poitier: 8 quotes2 likes

Famous Sidney Poitier Quotes

“I am the me I choose to be.”

Sidney Poitier

“A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.”

Sidney Poitier book The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

Source: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

“Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.”

Sidney Poitier book The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

Source: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography

“The older we get the less afraid we are.”

Sidney Poitier

From an print interview with AARP The Magazine (September/October 2008)

“I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.”

Sidney Poitier

"Oprah Talks to Sidney Poitier", http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Oprah-Interviews-Sidney-Poitier/1 O Magazine, October 2000

“If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things—you feel that after death, you will be no more.”

Sidney Poitier

"Oprah Talks to Sidney Poitier", http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Oprah-Interviews-Sidney-Poitier/1 O Magazine, October 2000

“The great disease of mankind is ignorance.
With knowledge you can grasp tight a belief: that you can be better, that the world can be better. With that, you can claim hope.
Hope is the eternal tool in the survival kit for mankind. We hope for a little luck, we hope for a better tomorrow, we hope — although it is an impossible hope — to somehow get out of this world alive.
And if we can't and don't, then it is enough to rejoice in our short time here and to remember how much we loved the view.”

Sidney Poitier

Source: Life Beyond Measure (2008), twenty-third letter — The World I Leave You, p. 273

“Compassion for other human beings has to extend to the society that’s been grinding the powerless under its heel. The more civilized the society becomes, the more humane it becomes; the more it can see its own humanity, the more it sees the ways in which its humanity has been behaving inhumanly. This injustice of the world inspires a rage so intense that to express it fully would require homicidal action; it’s self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage. Simply put, I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.”

Sidney Poitier

Variant: I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger; it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage — self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage — and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.
Source: The Measure of a Man (2000)

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