Motivation Quote by Mike Tyson

Tyson’s defense of pigeons lands with the disarming force of someone who’s spent a lifetime being treated like a threat. On paper it’s a throwaway line - why hate a harmless bird? - but the real charge is in who’s speaking. Tyson grew up in Brooklyn famously keeping pigeons, and that detail has followed him like a soft-focus counterweight to his public image: the brutal heavyweight who was, at heart, a kid with fragile, fluttering attachments. When he asks why anyone would “want to get rid” of them, he’s not really litigating urban wildlife policy; he’s questioning a reflex to erase what’s messy, poor-coded, and aesthetically inconvenient.

The grammar matters. “They don’t bother no one” is plainspoken, almost stubbornly unpolished, and it turns the argument into a kind of neighborhood ethics: mind your business, let things live. Pigeons are the perfect symbol here - ubiquitous, resilient, viewed as dirty largely because they’re everywhere and don’t ask permission to exist. Tyson’s sympathy for them reads as solidarity with the unwanted and the underestimated, including a younger version of himself.

There’s also a sly inversion of “nuisance.” Cities tolerate plenty that actually harms people - pollution, predatory landlords, aggressive policing - while fixating on a bird that mostly just occupies shared space. Tyson’s line, casual as it sounds, needles that hypocrisy: we’re quick to target what we can shoo away, not what we’re afraid to confront.