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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.

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