Bill James

“Professionalism in law has brought us the O.J. Simpson case in lieu of justice.”

“I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.”

“Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.”

“Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.”

“Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.”

“The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.”

“You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.”

“It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.”

“There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.”

“Crime shapes how we think about the world; it shapes social decisions that we make; it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don't talk about it intelligently.”

“None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.”

“The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.”

“We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day - fudging just a little on the definition of the word 'need.' We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.”

“The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.”

“If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.”

“Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.”

“Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.”

“Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.”

“I think among the population at large, people are openly fascinated with crime and don't feel any shame over it. It's only the opinion-makers and the 'opinion elites' who turn up their noses.”

“It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.”