“Giving a 10-year mandatory minimum for a second offense fist fight is not going to reduce the chance that someone will be stabbed 16 times when you are not funding any of the programs that are desperately needed to actually reduce juvenile crime.”

I must keep my sights on the final goal, to win, win, win-and with more love and passion than the world has ever witnessed in any performance.

The main thing is to care. Care very hard, even if it is only a game you are playing.

When we reach the point where the women athletes are getting their pick of dates just as easily as the men athletes, then we’ve really and truly arrived. Parity at last!

I think one of the concerns, anytime you’re in the human business, like sports, it’s a very high – risk endeavor.

A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.

You just know where to put the ball. You just feel it. It has been computed into your brain so many times ­ it is there.

If you have one gay experience, does that mean you’re gay? If you have one heterosexual experience, does that mean you’re straight? Life doesn’t work quite so cut and dried.

When you oppress people either by gender, by race, by sexual orientation, when you do that and the doors become ajar, they will fly open and they will come and they have.

I always listen, I ask children, I even ask adults in tennis, “What are your children playing?” And most of the time it’s not tennis. It’s pathetic.

Ask Nureyev to stop dancing, ask Sinatra to stop singing, then you can ask me to stop playing.

There is no life for girls in team sports past Little League. I got into tennis when I realized this, and because I thought golf would be too slow for me, and I was too scared to swim.

Sports are a microcosm of society. It just shows how much more competition there is in the world.

Ever since that day when I was 11 years old, and I wasn’t allowed in a photo because I wasn’t wearing a tennis skirt, I knew that I wanted to change the sport.

Men still get a lot more opportunity. It is still a big part of the old boy network… They have more companies they can get money from.

When a child signs up for tennis, he or she is put on a team. I put them in a circle and then I make sure they name their own team.

We have, or have had women presidents or prime ministers in Liberia, Chile, Germany, Great Britain…and yet the US of A still hasn’t had a women president. It’s just beyond my thinking. Look at Congress.

Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?

If I only had the chance, I’d ask one to dance, and I’d be dancing with myself.

It is never right to do wrong in order to get a chance to do right.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous.

It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back

Meaning isn’t something we discover, it is what we bring to life, either by choice or by chance.

The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn’t expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.