A. Bartlett Giamatti

“We have an obligation to spread amateur baseball both at home and abroad. Building up the game at all levels - Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, the colleges - is in our own self-interest. That's where the pool of talent is - and also of fans.”

“The professionals must set a good example.”

“Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.”

“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.”

“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 university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.”

“Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.”

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

“No one man is superior to the game.”

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

“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.”

“This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.”

“I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism.”

“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.”

“A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.”

“On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.”

“All I ever wanted to be was president of the American League.”

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

“Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things — and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most.”

“Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.”