“Baseball, like some other sports, poses as a sacred institution dedicated to the public good, but it is actually a big, selfish business with a ruthlessness that many big businesses would never think of displaying.”

This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.

Next time I go to a movie and see a picture of a little ordinary girl become a great star… I’ll believe it. And whenever I hear my wife read fairy tales to my little boy, I’ll listen. I know now that dreams do come true.

How you played in yesterday’s game is all that counts.

If I had to choose between baseball’s Hall of Fame and first class citizenship for all of my people. I would say first-class citizenship.

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.

The many of us who attain what we may and forget those who help us along the line we’ve got to remember that there are so many others to pull along the way. The farther they go, the further we all go.

Life is not a spectator sport.

At the beginning of the World Series of 1947, I experienced a completely new emotion when the National Anthem was played. This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for anyone else.

Relationships may change throughout the gift of time, memories stay the same forever in my mind.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

I know that I am a black man in a white world. I know that I never had it made.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

Pop flies, in a sense, are just a diversion for a second baseman. Grounders are his stock trade.

We have entered an era where individual investors are as powerful and sophisticated as institutions.

The state security bodies should not be seen as an institution that works against society and the state; one needs to understand what makes them work against their own people.

If a financial institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.

Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence.

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.