Sammy Davis Jr. Quotes

I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.

Ultimately, you have to not worry about people thinking you should have played him differently. You're the one playing the part so it has to be yours.

You can't really copy what I do because I don't do anything.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do.

I sometimes shy away because I don't want to be too 'showy-offy' but the older I get I think, 'You have a handkerchief, put it in your pocket.'

Do your own thing. Speak in your voice.

I'm hard to imitate because I'm not gifted enough.

I've had a lot of voices tell me what I should be making. Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn't allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.

I certainly wouldn't want to be a Mini Me of any of the people whose footsteps I've followed in.

I'm just myself. That's the best way to put it.

When I started acting in my twenties, a director on the set of an action film shouted, 'Just do it like your dad would.' I couldn't. I can only do things as I'd do them.

I have a lot of respect for people, and I feel they are far more sensible and responsible than to ape or imitate somebody.

I want to be myself otherwise what's the point.

You start comparing yourself to other people, you end up trying to be that person. You've got to be your own person, do it your own way. You can be motivated by somebody, but you don't have to take after them.

Ronald Reagan was the best Ronald Reagan ever, and Ronald Reagan was a cool guy. You're not Ronald Reagan. You can't run as him; you can't relive his career. You can't just have somebody else's career. You have to be you.

For the most part, I do the thing which my own nature prompts me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it.

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

Be your own person because no one can take that away from you.

Why can a man not act himself, be himself, and think for himself? It seems to me that naturalness alone is power; that a borrowed word is weaker than our own weakness, however small we may be.

Imitation is very easy, and the whole culture and society depends on imitation. Everybody is telling you how to behave, and whatsoever they are teaching you is nothing but imitation. Religious people - the so-called religious people, the priests, the theologians - they are also teaching you, 'Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like Krishna.' Nobody ever tells you, 'Just be yourself' - nobody. Everybody is against you, it seems. Nobody allows you to be yourself, nobody gives you any freedom. You can be in this world, but you must imitate somebody.

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.

Be neither a conformist or a rebel, for they are really the same thing. Find your own path, and stay on it.

I will write on the pages of history what I want them to say. I will be myself. I will speak my own name.