Michael Gerard Tyson is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1985 to 2005. He reigned as the undisputed world heavyweight champion and holds the record as the youngest boxer to win a heavyweight title at 20 years, four months and 22 days old. Tyson retired from professional boxing in 2006, after being knocked out in consecutive matches against Danny Williams and Kevin McBride. Tyson was known for his ferocious and intimidating boxing style as well as his controversial behavior inside and outside the ring.
Nicknamed “Iron” and “Kid Dynamite” in his early career, and later known as “The Baddest Man on the Planet”, Tyson is considered one of the best heavyweights of all time. Tyson holds the third longest unified championship reign in heavyweight history at eight consecutive defenses. He has been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame and the World Boxing Hall of Fame.
Some of the best quotes from Mike Tyson are listed below.
- “A man who was friendly with everyone was an enemy to himself.” – Mike Tyson
- “Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just a cycle.” – Mike Tyson
- “Anyone with a grain of sense would know that if I punched my wife I would rip her head off. It’s all lies. I have never laid a finger on her.” – Mike Tyson
- “As long as we persevere and endure, we can get anything we want.” – Mike Tyson
- “Burning cocaine is the worst smell in the world. It smells like burning plastic and rat poison combined.” – Mike Tyson
- “Confidence breeds success and success breeds confidence. Confidence applied properly surpasses genius.” – Mike Tyson
- “Discipline is doing what you hate to do but doing it like you love it.” – Mike Tyson
- “Everybody thinks this is a tough man’s sport. This is not a tough man’s sport. This is a thinking man’s sport. A tough man is gonna get hurt real bad in this sport.” – Mike Tyson
- “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.” – Mike Tyson
- “Everyone says I wish I was in your shoes, the hundreds of people that wish they were in my shoes don’t know the tenth of it. If they were in my shoes they would cry like a baby.” – Mike Tyson
- “Everyone that you fight is not your enemy and everyone who helps you is not your friend.” – Mike Tyson
- “Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.” – Mike Tyson
- “Greatness is not guarding yourself from the people; greatness is being accepted by the people.” – Mike Tyson
- “I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.” – Mike Tyson
- “I know how hard it is to be a woman, especially a black woman.” – Mike Tyson
- “I’m a dreamer. I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I grab a handful of clouds.” – Mike Tyson
- “If they don’t have that extreme addict personality, you can never understand how a guy can blow 300 or 400 million dollars. If I have to live at the top of the world, I also have to live at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know how to live in the middle of life.” – Mike Tyson
- “It’s good to be successful and have financial status but if you’re only gonna live for the money, you’re only gonna reach a certain status and I’m in there for greatness and peace of mind.” – Mike Tyson
- “It’s good to know how to read, but it’s dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you’re reading.” – Mike Tyson
- “Our money is bait money, and bait money is not to be used.” – Mike Tyson
- “People are going to say what they say. I know sometimes I say things; I offend people.” – Mike Tyson
- “Some people try to get you out of slavery for you to be their slave.” – Mike Tyson
- “Some students would make fun of me, but nobody messed with me.” – Mike Tyson
- “Sometimes I’d give my mother a hundred bucks and she wouldn’t pay me back. She didn’t respect me like that. I’d say, “You owe me some money, Ma. And she’d just say, You owe me your life, boy. I’m not paying you back.” – Mike Tyson
- “That equals to being a fool, having fame and no fortune. A lot of guys out there have fame doing this and doing that, but they are broke.” – Mike Tyson
- “The ability to apply the discipline, the ability to do what needs to be done no matter how he feels inside, in my opinion, is the definition of a true professional.” – Mike Tyson
- “The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind.” – Mike Tyson
- “Unfortunately, sometimes you can’t have fun accomplishing your goals. Sometimes people don’t have the determination, the will, the steadfastness, the tenacity, they give in under the slightest struggle.” – Mike Tyson
- “We live in a society where we basically live and strive on what people think about us. We’re more visual people so what we see is basically what we believe which is not necessarily true.” – Mike Tyson
- “We wanna believe that we’re different than the average guy that’s working 9-to-5, that our thoughts are different than his. Our inspirations and desires are different than his, that’s why we succeed and he didn’t cos we wanna believe we’re different, but he just didn’t get the break that we had or he wasted it on something else.” – Mike Tyson
- “Whatever you want, especially when you’re striving to be the best in the world at something, there’ll always be disappointments, and you can’t be emotionally tied to them, because they’ll break your spirit.” – Mike Tyson
- “When you have something in life that you want to accomplish greatly you have to be willing to give up your happiness. I’ve lost all my sensitivity as far as being embarrassed, being shy, you just have to lose that.” – Mike Tyson
- “You can change your mind or your life whenever you want to.” – Mike Tyson
- “You can’t be disturbed by anything. There’s no emotion involved. You can’t feel sorrow, you can’t feel pity, there’s nothing you feel. The job has to be done.” – Mike Tyson
