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.

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.

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.

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

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

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

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.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

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

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

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.