Arnold Schwarzenegger
126 quotes
Biography
Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian and American actor, businessman, film producer, politician, and former professional bodybuilder. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 38th governor of California from 2003 to 2011.
"Failure is not an option. Everyone has to succeed."
"The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character."
"The success I have achieved in bodybuilding, motion pictures, and business would not have been possible without the generosity of the American people and the freedom here to pursue your dreams."
"I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way - I hope it never will."
"For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer."
"I used to feel that women were here for one reason. Sex was simply another kind of exercise, another body function. I was convinced a girl and I couldn't communicate on equal footing because she wouldn't understand what I was doing. I didn't have time to take one girl out regularly and go through a normal high-school romance with all its phone calls and notes and squabbles. That took too much time. I needed to be in the gym. For me it was a simple matter of picking them up at the lake, and then never seeing them again."
"Eventually there was a split between my parents about me. My mother obviously knew what was going on with me and the girls my friends lined up. She never came out and said anything directly, but she let me know she was concerned. Things were different between me and my father. He assumed that when I was eighteen, I would just go into the Army and they would straighten me out. He accepted some of the things my mother condemned. He felt it was perfectly all right to make out with all the girls I could. In fact, he was proud I was dating the fast girls. He bragged about them to his friends. 'Jesus Christ, you should see some of the women my son's coming up with'. He was showing off, of course. But still, our whole relationship had changed because I'd established myself by winning a few trophies and now had some girls. He was particularly excited about the girls. And he liked the idea that I didn't get involved. 'That's right, Arnold', he'd say, as though he'd had endless experience, 'never be fooled by them'. That continued to be an avenue of communication between us for a couple of years. In fact, the few nights I took girls home when I was on leave from the Army, my father was always very pleasant and would bring out a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses."
"The greatest feeling you can get in a gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can get in a gym is the pump. Let's say you trained your biceps: blood is rushing into your muscle, and that would be called a pump. Your muscles get this really tight feeling, like your skin is going to explode any minute [...] It blows air and it feels different, it feels fantastic. It's as satisfying to me as cumming is, as having sex with a woman and cumming. So can you believe how much I am in heaven? I'm getting the feeling of cumming in a gym, I'm getting the feeling of cumming at home, I am, like, getting the feeling of cumming in the gym, I'm getting the feeling of cumming at home, I'm getting the feeling of cumming backstage. When I pump up, when I pose out in front of 5,000 people, I get the same feeling, so I am cumming day and night. It's terrific, right? So I am in heaven."
"If a girl comes on strong and says, 'I really dig your body and I want to fuck the shit out of you,' I just decide whether or not I like her. If I do take her home, I try to make sure I get just as much out of it as she does. The word exploited therefore wouldn't apply."
"Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's — the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train — there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together."
"I get laid on purpose. I can't sleep before any competition and I'm up all night, anyway, so instead of staring at the ceiling I figure I might as well find somebody and fuck... we had girls backstage giving head, then all of us went out and I won. It didn't bother me at all; in fact, I went out there feeling like King Kong."
"What I want to do is make Americans aware that they're fucked-up when they equate everything a person does with some sexual trip. You know, if you hold a pencil in your hand, it's a phallic symbol and you really want to hold a cock in your hand. And a football coach doesn't really want to be a coach, he likes to slap football players' asses...he's a latent homosexual. And it goes on and on and on, all the fucking time."
"America is so money-oriented. (Thank God! It's always helped me!) But it has its disadvantages because the psychiatrists know their business doesn't mean a thing if there are no sick people around, and so they make everybody feel guilty. You know, all New York City is running to a psychiatrist. All America thinks it has sexual hang ups. Everybody's running to shrinks."
"Nixon was always being attacked sexually. It was always said that he was a fag and that he had no sexual relations with his wife for 15 years and that was why he liked power. And Hitler had only one ball, and that was why he wanted to conquer the world."
"Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength. When you make an impasse passable, that is strength. But you must have ego, the kind of ego which makes you think of yourself in terms of superlatives. You must want to be the greatest. We are all starved for compliments. So we do things that get positive feedback."
"I was 15 years old and I looked in the mirror. I was standing there in front of the mirror, totally naked. There was one particular part of my body that was bigger than the rest of it. I'm a man of perfection, and so I said to myself, 'I've got to bring the rest of the body up to the standard of this one part.' And so that's when I started exercising. Very simple."
"I play the Terminator, but you guys are the true terminators."
"My hair was pulled. I was hit with belts. So was the kid next door, and so was the kid next door. It was just the way it was. Many of the children I've seen were broken by their parents, which was the German-Austrian mentality. Break the will. They didn't want to create an individual.... It was all about conforming. I was one who did not conform and whose will could not be broken. Therefore I became a rebel. Every time I got hit, and every time someone said, 'You can't do this,' I said, 'This is not going to be for much longer, because I'm going to move out of here... of course, I had no plan how."
"In sports, you learn competition means go after it, win it. And not to let anything else interfere. It's something you learn, and it sticks with you. I consider myself an expert in looking into a particular idea or goal and then going after it without anything else in mind... It's always the same kind of thing. You pick a goal, and then you just go after it, accomplish it, and get satisfaction out of that."
"I found a new me. When I first came over to America, it was like, 'How can I be rich? How can I build my movie career? How can I become the most muscular man?' It was all about me, and then there was this turn, and I found it was really great to do this."
"Why not? With my way of thinking, you always shoot for the top."
"We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late... The science is clear. The global warming debate is over."
"She maybe is Puerto Rican or the same thing as Cuban. I mean, they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it."
"This guy is just fumbling around."
"Just remember, you can't climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets."