Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

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

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.

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.

Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.