Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

These useless men ought to be cut up and served at a banquet. I really believe that athletes have less intelligence than swine.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

Courage and grace is a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is in the bullring.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.

Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.

Hunting is all that’s worth living for—all time is lost what is not spent in hunting—it is like the air we breathe—if we have it not we die—it’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt.

A win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.

Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.