“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.”

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.

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.

They say military have the so-called ‘secret intelligence’ – this amount of intelligence must be very secret, since I’ve never seen any intelligent military person, nor I have seen any sense in the bloody stupid wars.

I strongly believe that fundamental science cannot be driven by instructional, industrial, governmental or military pressures.

In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.

Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.

U.S. military action in Iraq: It sure didn’t work out well last time.

Medical researchers and military analysts forebode grim consequences.