Bobby Knight

“I don't think my dad ever raised his voice to my mother or to me, ever.”

“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.”

“Walking has been ridiculous in college basketball the past 15 years.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'll tell you one thing about Donald Trump: There will never be a Benghazi in a Donald Trump administration.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I've never predicted anything. All I have ever said is, that we will do the very best we can.”

“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.”

“The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.”