“The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust.”

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.

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’ve played everything – baseball, football, basketball. I can still swim a mile a day. That’s why I can’t walk.

I was planning to be a baseball player until I ran into something called a curveball. And that set me back.

I was born to hit a baseball. I can hit a baseball.

I did not vote Labour because they’ve heard of Oasis and nobody is going to vote Tory because William Hague has got a baseball cap.

I wasn’t ever good enough to be on the baseball team and that sort of stuff.

I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.

I’d never even been to Wrigley Field. I never even enjoyed baseball that much, but I loved being there, the crowd was lovely, and they all sang with me!

One theme that fascinates me is cognitive enhancement. It seems only a matter of time until we live in a world where steroids for the brain are readily available to all. And once we come to grips with that reality,