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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

One great reason why many children abandon themselves wholly to silly sports and trifle away all their time insipidly is because they have found their curiosity baulked and their inquiries neglected.

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