My concentration was really on getting to university and becoming a doctor. My parents let me know that school marks were important. Achievement was something which came by hard work.

The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.

I found longer races boring. I found the mile just perfect.

You get very tired, and there was a certain amount of pain and you slow up. Your legs are so tired that you are in fact slowing. If you don't keep running, keep your blood circulating, the muscles stop pumping the blood back and you get dizzy.

My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.

My introduction to track racing was through the background of cross country running, which is not a sport perhaps as popular in America as it is in England.

I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event in which races were run, and I won these by a considerable margin.

Athletics is a luxury.

My athleticism was really the core to social acceptance, because in those days the overwhelming number of students came from more of a public school background than I did.

It had always been a British preoccupation to hold this mile record.

May is a very early time in the year and the weather is usually bad. You cannot run a fast mile race if there is a strong wind, because it makes your running uneven.

I was always a great bundle of energy. As a child, instead of walking, I would run. And so running, which is a pain to a lot of people, was always a pleasure to me because it was so easy.

I was involved in music, acting, and some running, but my firm wish was to become a doctor. That was the formative age when I had decided on the pattern of my career.

I raced supremely well. I felt I was as well fitted to do it as I had ever been, and as perhaps I might ever be. I went climbing three weeks before, because I was feeling fed up with running.

I lived on the top of one hill and the school was at the top of another hill. Nobody ever went to school by car - we didn't have any cars during the war. So that to and from school was itself a training.

Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.

The reason sport is attractive to many of the general public is that it's filled with reversals. What you think may happen doesn't happen. A champion is beaten, an unknown becomes a champion.

I think that is a universal adolescent feeling, trying to find your place. The adolescent who is perfectly adjusted to his environment, I've yet to meet.

If there was the opportunity to climb a mountain, or to go ballooning, or some adventurous activity, I would always be keen to do it. I loved the countryside.

The Athletic Association competed against the University. So there was an event. You cannot break world records unless it is an established event, and you have three timekeepers, and the whole thing is organized.

I've always been very impatient. At age 10 I frankly found life boring, and I can remember age 9 having the awful thought, as it seems now looking back on it, A war! That should liven things up a bit!

Your spikes, which were really quite long then, would catch the material of the track and your shoe would get heavier. I was simply filing them down and rubbing some graphite on the spikes. I thought I would run more effectively.

I couldn't disappoint people. I did not want to fail and exhaust myself, because I was the kind of runner who trained so little that I couldn't race again within another 10 days.

Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.

I came from such a simple origin, without any great privilege, and I would say I also wanted to make a mark. It wasn't until I was about 15 that I appeared in a race.

It's a question of spreading the available energy, aerobic and anaerobic, evenly over four minutes. If you run one part too fast, you pay a price. If you run another part more slowly your overall time is slower.

I wanted to be a neurologist. That seemed to be the most difficult, most intriguing, and the most important aspect of medicine, which had links with psychology, aggression, behavior, and human affairs.

I enjoy singing, and the instruments which truly move me are the horn, the trumpet and the cello.

Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science.

When I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say that for her the important thing was for me to become a doctor - a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. Sport was something to be set aside.

My concentration was really on getting to university and becoming a doctor. My parents let me know that school marks were important. Achievement was something which came by hard work.

Beating John Landy was my defining race.

I had always wanted to become a neurologist, which is one of the most demanding vocations in medicine. Where do you stop, after all, with the brain? How does it function? What are its limits? The work seems unending.

I trained for less than three-quarters of an hour, maybe five days a week - I didn't have time to do more. But it was all about quality, not quantity - so I didn't waste time jogging, ever.

It's amazing that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have broken the 4-minute mile.

Doctors and scientists said breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead

You get very tired and there was a certain amount of pain and you slow up. Your legs are so tired that you are in fact slowing. If you dont keep running keep your blood circulating the muscles stop pumping the blood back and you get dizzy.

We run, not because we think it is doing us good, but because we enjoy it and cannot help ourselves.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

Dissatisfaction with possession and achievement is one of the requisites to further achievement.

There is no personal achievement in being born beautiful.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those who strive mightily Shall possess it.

My real achievement is my daughter and my three beautiful grandchildren.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.