Bob Knight quotes

Bob Knight was an American basketball coach renowned for his intense coaching style and success at Indiana University. His career was marked by three NCAA championships and innovative defensive strategies. He remains a significant and sometimes controversial figure in the history of college basketball. Here are 31 of his quotes:

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

Bob Knight

People change over the years, and that changes situations for good and for bad.

Bob Knight

You don't play against opponents, you play against the game of basketball.

Bob Knight

The key is not the will to win... everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.

Bob Knight

Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.

Bob Knight

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

Bob Knight

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.

Bob Knight

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.

Bob Knight

During my 40-year coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech, my teams reached the Final Four on five occasions, winning the national championship three times.

Bob Knight

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

Bob Knight

And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit.

Bob Knight

Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?

Bob Knight

If I came in to recruit your son, I would tell you, your wife, and your son, that I will be the most demanding coach your son can play for.

Bob Knight

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

Bob Knight

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'

Bob Knight

I don't intend to retire.

Bob Knight

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.

Bob Knight

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

Bob Knight

I think that it's perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don't want defeat. We don't want defeat in sport. We don't want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What's going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?

Bob Knight

I don't have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.

Bob Knight

As his team prepares, a coach's entire being must be concentrated on winning games.

Bob Knight

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.'

Bob Knight