If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.
—Reggie Jackson, 1976Quotes
Idolatry is the mother of all games.
—Novatian, c. 255Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.
—Philip Stubbes, 1583I 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.
—Anna Sewell, 1877Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.
—Bion of Smyrna, c. 100 BCWe 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.
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
—Juvenal, c. 121Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.
—Thomas Gouge, 1672The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.
—Molière, 1670A 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.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987A win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.
—E.M. Forster, 1919The gods play games with men as balls.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCNo human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.
—W.H. Auden, 1962