Knute Rockne Football Quotations

Let's win one for the Gipper.

No star playing, just football.

I enjoy talking to my football men and my chemistry classes and I feel sure that they are quite interested in what I have to say.

The only qualifications for a lineman are to be big and dumb. To be a back, you only have to be dumb.

Generalities don't count and won't help you in football.

I've found that prayers work best when you have big players.

It isn't necessary to see a good tackle. You can hear it.

The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game.

Show me a gracious loser and I'll show you a failure.

The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for. A lot of people seem to think there is some sort of magic in making a winning football team. There isn't, but there's plenty of work.

Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.

Four years of football are calculated to breed in the average man more of the ingredients of success in life than almost any academic course he takes.

Yes, I know that you feel you are not strong enough. That's what the enemy thinks, too. But we're gonna fool them.

The essence of football was blocking, tackling, and execution based on timing, rhythm and deception.

Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective. I don't want a football player who doesn't take defeat to heart, who laughs it off with the thought, "Oh, well, there's another Saturday." The trouble in American life today, in business as well as in sports, is that too many people are afraid of competition. The result is that in some circles people have come to sneer at success if it costs hard work and training and sacrifice.