Explore Quotes by A. Bartlett Giamatti

Some of my academic friends think I've fallen from a very special grace.

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.

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

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

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

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

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.

The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.

As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre - except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places.

Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.

The professionals must set a good example.

There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball.

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.

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