“There are a lot of people who know me who can’t understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.”

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

No one man is superior to the game.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America’s most privileged version of the level field.

The professionals must set a good example.

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.

Major sports are major parts of society. It’s not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

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.

I used to soak my mitts in a bucket of water for about two days. Then I’d put a couple of baseballs in the pocket and wrap it up with a rubber band.

I knew when my career was over. In 1965 my baseball card came out with no picture.

Today you don’t have to do that, because catchers’ mitts are more like first baseman’s gloves.

I was acting when I was playing baseball.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

Any teammate of mine that had a kid and a boy that was capable of playing baseball.

Baseball hasn’t forgotten me. I go to a lot of old-timers games and I haven’t lost a thing. I sit in the bullpen and let people throw things at me. Just like old times.