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

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.

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

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

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

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.

You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you’re going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they’re here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

I’m not going to sit here now and say ‘do this,’ or ‘do that.’ But you must – must – expunge any vestige of racism.

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That’s why we get into trouble all the time. We’re always viewed as naive.

All I ever wanted to be president of was the American League.

There are a lot of people who know me who can’t understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.

If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.

It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.

While carrying responsibilities, never forget to smile.

But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata and to the ebbing of the sea after the formations of new layers.

You have however within you an inclination towards completeness.

I have the responsibility of over four million people, and I am in a position to do good, to be able to bring about a new life for my people, and I will continue to move in that direction.

Life is of little value unless it be consecrated by duty.

It’s not pressure. It’s responsibility We put it on ourselves.