Dick Butkus Quotes

Football's not a bastion for toughness. It's not a bastion of anything uplifting or good for men or anybody else.

I don't have to put on shoulder pads and run out there and let somebody hit on me a little bit.

Football is a violent game. We are violent men.

In the NFL, if you make the play or you don't make the play, you're just a football player who did or didn't make the play. You don't get more yards or less yards based on what you're labeled as by society.

I want to focus on football and just go on the pitch to do my thing.

We always said it's not suit-and-tie on the football field.

College lacrosse can be pretty brutal at times, so that definitely helped me with the toughness. It's a fast-paced game, so that helped me kind of translate over to the game speed of playing in the NFL. I think just the one-on-one aspect of trying to beat the guy in front of you definitely helped me as being a receiver.

I've always been very competitive - that runs in our family. I'd always try to beat my brother. I'd race the boys and wanted to beat them. They toughened me up. They didn't treat me like a girl.

There are tough players and nice guys, and I'm a tough player

There are times when I'm watching an NFL quarterback struggling to get through the game, and I get bitter to some extent.

It's brutal out on the football field.

I want to be known for my athletic achievements, not my celebrity.

The NFL has gone a long way to Disney-fy its image, but it's not Disney. It's the MMA. It's a violent, brutal human war, with rules. The same guy who says, 'I'm going to rob everybody,' is the same guy who would be successful in the NFL.

Football doesn't build character. It eliminates the weak ones.

You know, I don't only play for the record books.

I do play football no-holds-barred. Any edge I can get, I'll take. I'd grab a face mask only in a fit of anger. Uncontrolled anger is damn near insane.

During the season... fun, to me, is getting sacks, making tackles and winning games. It's not spending money, girls, or, you know, this and that.

For guys playing sports at a high level, for money, I can't put my finger on it, but in a man's world of sport, there is something visceral to beating another man.

In front of the world, all of a sudden I'm a great athlete and I'm put into an environment with 25 other women and I'm expected to go to team meals, team functions.

Don't matter what they throw at us. Only angry people win football games.

You should never say 'D'Brickashaw' and 'bust' in the same sentence. You should never even think that. It should be D'Brickashaw, Pro Bowl, D'Brickashaw, Jets, Super Bowl.

Football was always a deal we made with ourselves. We adopted it for its brutality, which was embedded in a context that happened to be perfectly suited to television and to gambling, but which we could convince ourselves was only incidental to our enjoyment because it was only incidental to the game itself.

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.

I used to play softball every summer back in Quitman. My two brothers demanded I be tough. There were certain girls they wouldn't let me invite over because they were too feminine and fragile.

A college athlete is going to be competitive. You don't get to that level if you're not.