A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre - except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places.

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

The professionals must set a good example.

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.

There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball.

People will say I'm an idealist. I hope so.

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.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust.

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.

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

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.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace.

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch -- engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.