“The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.”

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

No one man is superior to the game.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America’s most privileged version of the level field.

The professionals must set a good example.

On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch — engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.

Major sports are major parts of society. It’s not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

I’m the world’s expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.

People will say I’m an idealist. I hope so.

On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.

Nationality is the creative power of human culture, culture is the creative power of nationality.

They say my verse is sad: no wonder; Its narrow measure spans Tears of eternity, and sorrow, Not mine. but man’s.

I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.