The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.

I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

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.

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

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.

The gods play games with men as balls.

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

The true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war.

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?

We cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were not allowed all the freedom of the boy in romping, climbing, swimming, playing whoop and ball.

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.