“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.”

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.

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.

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

A sense of humour and a little lack of respect: That’s what you need to make a legend survive.

Horrors, I believe, should be original – the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence.

Muhammad Ali is a legend, a hero of mine.

I’m drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out.

[Harriet Tubman] is a legend, an icon, a soldier on the side of justice, a spiritual warrior, and a servant of God.

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.