Bill Veeck Quotes

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

There are only two seasons - winter and Baseball.

I'm for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done.

I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity.

Tradition is the albatross around the neck of progress.

If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.

The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.

I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.

I don't mind the high price of stardom. I just don't like the high price of mediocrity.

The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.

If you can't outsmart people, outwork them.

To give one can of beer to a thousand people is not nearly as much fun as to give 1,000 cans of beer to one guy. You give a thousand people a can of beer and each of them will drink it, smack his lips and go back to watching the game. You give 1,000 cans to one guy, and there is always the outside possibility that 50,000 people will talk about it.

This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There's time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.

How can you be a sage if you're pretty? You can't get your wizard papers without wrinkles.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball's wounds are self-inflicted.

Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too?

Baseball is a boy's game that makes grown men cry.

I don't want the natural athlete -- I want a guy who'll go after the hard ones.

What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!... Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.

I do not think that winning is the most important thing. I think winning is the only thing.

Suffering is overrated. It doesn't teach you anything.

Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere.

I believe in God, but I'm not too clear on the other details.

Next to the confrontation between two highly honed batteries of lawyers, jungle warfare is a stately minuet.