Shortly after the end of last season, I felt that I probably would not return for the 1999-2000 season. I also felt that I should take as much time as possible to sort through my feelings and make sure that my feelings were backed with conviction.

I want to thank all of the fans and media who made playing in the NFL such a wonderful experience. I have had the pleasure of meeting many of them.

I quit because I didn't feel like the Detroit Lions had a chance to win. It just killed my enjoyment of the game.

Christianity affects your whole life. I feel I'm more competitive, a better player, but off the field is where there is always a battle.

It was a wonderful experience to play in the NFL, and I have no regrets. I truly will miss playing for the Lions. I consider the Lions' players, coaches, staff, management and fans my family. I leave on good terms with everyone in the organization.

Shortly after the end of last season, I felt that I probably would not return for the 1999-2000 season. I also felt that I should take as much time as possible to sort through my feelings and make sure that my feelings were backed with conviction.

I wish my teammates, coaches and the entire Lions organization all the best.

My desire to exit the game is greater than my desire to remain in it. I have searched my heart through and through and feel comfortable with this decision.

The game is the ultimate significance to me because it is so important to a lot of people. It has left a mark on our culture to be voted as one of the best to ever play.

Let's just win it and go home.

Anyone who has played the game professionally, you're always taught that the ball is the most important, most precious thing, so when the ball hits the ground, it's always a mad scramble. It's amazing how many times there is a fumble, and the person who recovers it initially doesn't walk away with the ball.

As a kid, I played my share of football in the street or in a vacant lot.

As a kid, I played my share of football in the street or in a vacant lot. When we were playing in the street, it was more touch football, so we didn't hit each other into cars.

Happiness does not come from football awards. It's terrible to correlate happiness with football. Happiness comes from a good job, being able to feed your wife and kids. I don't dream football, I dream the American dream - two cars in a garage, be a happy father.

I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do in school, but I definitely didn't have adequate time to reach my full potential as a student.

I don't want to get too detailed into it, but when you're a good high school running back, you can almost be whatever type of runner you want to be. If you're a good size and a good athlete, you can be whatever type of runner you want.

I really love peace and quiet.

I'm from Kansas, so there were a lot of vacant lots and open fields to tackle each other in so we could avoid tackling each other on the street. But running on the street and trying not to get taken down on the concrete, that will make you fast, that's for sure.

I'm not better than anyone else. I'm not supposed to be on a pedestal. I've always stayed away from that.

If I could start with anybody, I would initially draft Tom Brady. Then I would go get Ray Lewis, and then maybe an offensive lineman, or somebody like Adrian Peterson.

In all the time that people have known me, has anyone ever heard me talk about the importance of rushing records or finishing with the most touchdowns? So if that's never been important to me, then why would that be a motivation to keep playing?

Individual goals never meant that much to me. The Heisman is no exception.

It's hard to win in the NFL. You have to maintain a very delicate balance putting together the right team to be able to win and have any amount of success.

Life doesn't stop with football.

Nothing ever turns out the way people expect it to.

You can look at everything from pre-Heisman to post-Heisman, and I think that's why it ranks up at the top, because before then, I didn't even think I was good enough to be a professional ballplayer.

You know, I'm fairly intelligent, but I don't think my grades reflected that.

And their conviction is that if it is done with that kind of purity it will go somewhere. I believe that with all my heart, but I'm not responsible for its going somewhere.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

Music is a hobby, because I'm not making any money out of it, but I put just as much conviction into that as I do into my acting.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.

Courage and conviction are powerful weapons against an enemy who depends only on fists or guns. Animals know when you are afraid; a coward knows when you are not.

I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.

And indeed this theme has been at the centre of all my research since 1943, both because of its intrinsic fascination and my conviction that a knowledge of sequences could contribute much to our understanding of living matter.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

A large part of the present anxiety to improve the education of girls and women is also due to the conviction that the political disabilities of women will not be maintained.

I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

I tried to instill a different motivation, to give them the security and the conviction that they were doing something good, something necessary, something useful - if you want to use a grandiose expression, that they were doing something for peace.