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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

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

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

The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.