Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.

Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.

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

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

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.

If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.

I do love cricket—it’s so very English.

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

Play, wherein persons of condition, especially ladies, waste so much of their time, is a plain instance to me that men cannot be perfectly idle; they must be doing something, for how else could they sit so many hours toiling at that which generally gives more vexation than delight to people whilst they are actually engaged in it?

The gods play games with men as balls.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world: it gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. The picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?

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