“The professionals must set a good example.”

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.

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.

My own definition of leadership is this: The capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.

I’m lining up my troops to go to battle with. Tarver is the man at light heavyweight. He has the credibility of the fans and media, and that’s what counts. That’s why I am taking this risk, but I am taking it by preparing myself with good people.

I must destroy everybody that comes in front of me. I must execute them and I must do it in grand style. I must slay Robert Allen like I must slay De La Hoya or anybody else that steps in that ring.

I got knocked down. Anybody could be knocked down, anybody can be knocked out, but it’s not what happened, but what happens next.

Did you hear what this idiot just said!? He said it’s not about the W…It’s everything about the W with me!

I still shop at Costco. I just started tipping two years ago.

The motivation comes from the embarrassment of having lost and the way it sits with you.

Smokey Wilson was like my Gandhi. If I had run into somebody else in prison, with a different set of values, the world might have never known one of the greatest boxing talents ever to come out of Philadelphia.