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

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The gods play games with men as balls.

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