A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes

Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.

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

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.

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 liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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's nothing bad that accrues from baseball.

For all the allure of speciously stress-free suburbs, for all the grinding of city life, cities endure. And when all those diverse energies are harnessed, and those choices, private and public, cohere, and all the bargains made in a million ways every day hold up, then a city flourishes and is the most stimulating center for life, and the most precious artifact, a culture can create. Think of great cities large and small (size, as with any work of art, does not necessarily determine value) and, in addition to nodes of government, commerce, law, hospitals, libraries, and newspapers will come to mind, as will restaurants and theaters and houses of worship and museums and opera houses and galleries and universities. And so will stadia and arenas and parks. In short, once finds not simply commerce but culture, not simply work but leisure, not only negotium but otium, not simply that which ennobles but also that which perfects us. Such has forever been the ultimate purpose of a city, to mirror our higher state, not simply to shelter us from wind and rain. As with leisure, so with the city: It is the setting to make us not the best that Nature can make us, but to manifest the best we, humankind, adding Art to Nature, can make us.

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

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.

The professionals must set a good example.

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

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.

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

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.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped and summer was gone.

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

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.

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.

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 play aspires to the condition of paradise ... through play in all its forms ... we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden ... always as removed, as an enclosed green place ... Paradise is an ancient dream ... It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.