“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.”

There’s nothing bad that accrues from baseball.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

I think that the young people today feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to their brothers and sisters because of the sacrifices that most families make to send their children to college.

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.

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.

This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There’s time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.

The more self-centered and egotistical a guy is, the better ballplayer he’s going to be.

Baseball is a game of averages, but over a short period of time, to have a little luck going is not a bad thing.

Why, oh why with so many other positions in baseball did I take up this one.’

It enrages me to see only certain players singled out for the Hall of Fame because they were born with a God-given specialty.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.

I think my mom and dad did a great job with that, because we [with brother] never had any competition in baseball. We always tried to help each other.