A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI

I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.

All I ever wanted to be was president of the American League.

Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

No one man is superior to the game.

A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.

I think that the young people today feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to their brothers and sisters because of the sacrifices that most families make to send their children to college.

There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.

The professionals must set a good example.

I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism.

The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

We have an obligation to spread amateur baseball both at home and abroad. Building up the game at all levels - Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, the colleges - is in our own self-interest. That's where the pool of talent is - and also of fans.

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

Some of my academic friends think I've fallen from a very special grace.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.