Thoroughbred Quotes

My first winner was on Legal Steps, in Ireland, at Thurles, in March 1992. I rode for Jim Bolger, and his stable jockey was Christy Roche.

Black beauty - he's a dark horse.

My favorite horse was Zenyatta. She got me hooked.

You can't run a mule in the Kentucky Derby.

It's a rare and special feeling to ride a racehorse.

… human thoroughbreds

You can't win the Kentucky Derby unless you're on a thoroughbred.

Joseph Beringer...dances around behind me singing some poorly rhymed and slightly dirty song about my [racing] odds at my skirts. 'I don't even wear skirts,' I snap at him. 'Especially,' he says, 'in my daydreams.

If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn't shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up with the next race.

Some kind of pace may be got out of the eeriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood.

I had great faith in Prince Of Penzance, from the moment I rode him for the first time.

I crossed paths with a horse that happened to change my life. That horse is Game On Dude, and what a horse! He's a soldier. Together we traveled the world. We won the Santa Anita Big Cap, Goodwood, almost won the Breeder's Cup Classic; we won the San Antonio, Hollywood Gold Cup and the Californian.

If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, you'll never end up with a nag.

I view anything on this farm as model. I actually painted Union Rags as a yearling.

Everybody is talking about the Triple Crown, but I want to win the Open. That is my aim.

What is courage? Let me tell you what I think it is. An indefinable quality that makes a man put out that extra something, when it seems there is nothing else to give. I dare you to be better than you are. I dare you to be a thoroughbred.

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

Secretariat was just ridiculously endowed with every positive quality that a person would seek out in a non-human. He was very aware of his environment; he surveyed the terrain before he ran and would look people in the eye.

The difference between a mongrel and a thoroughbred, whether brute or man, is not in swiftness, beauty, or endurance, but in courage.

Many people think the Cards at the end of the wire will cross the finish line first.

I just look like someone with a long face. Not just A. P. McCoy himself, but some of the horses he rides.

I played a great horse yesterday! It took seven horses to beat him.

In 1938... the year's #1 newsmaker was not FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. Nor was it Lou Gehrig or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.