Sport is imposing¹ order on what was chaos².

Anthony Starr

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.

Bill Shankly, In Sunday Times (UK) Oct. 4 1981

Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.

Erma Bombeck (1927 - 1996)

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.

George F. Will (1941 - )

Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence³.

George F. Will (1941 - )

For when the One Great Scorer comes

To write against your name,

He marks-not that you won or lost-

But how you played the game.

Grantland Rice, "Alumunus Football," Only the Brave and Other Poems, p. 144 (1941)

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

Heywood Broun (1888 - 1939)

Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.

Joe Theismann, Former quarterback

I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical⁴ peg⁵ through a circular hole, and how they do it over and over again for months when they figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic⁶ version of that same exercise.

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

It's not so important who starts the game but who finishes it.

John Wooden (1910 - )

If it weren't for baseball, many kids wouldn't know what a millionaire looked like.

Phyllis Diller

For people to judge a man's worth and his very manhood according to the way he feels about sport, and not to recognize it for the piddly, inconsequential goings on that it really is...

Robin⁷ Green and Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, Birds of a Feather, 1993

I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.

Rodney Dangerfield (1921 - 2004)

Not every age is fit for childish sports.

Titus Maccius Plautus (254 BC - 184 BC)

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

Wayne Gretzky (1961 - )

If all the year were playing holidays; To sport would be as tedious as to work.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), 'The First Part of King Henry the IV'

Desire is the most important factor in the success of any athlete.

Willie Shoemaker

Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical.

Yogi Berra (1925 - )