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.
Author
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
33 quotations
About Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is an American former professional basketball player who was a center for 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers. He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins. A member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Abdul-Jabbar won a record six NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards. He was a 19-time NBA All-Star, a 15-time All-NBA Team member, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team selection. He was a me…
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Kareem Abdul-JabbarI'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.
This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher.
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.
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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 i…
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.
A lot of young players don't really know much about the history of the game and a lot of them are missing out on what the game is all about, especially the whole concept of sportsmanship and teamwork.
The type of leukemia that I am dealing with is treatable. So if I do what my doctors tell me to do - get my blood checked regularly, take my meds and consult with my doctor and follow any additional …
My health is fine.
I think that the good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.