A. Bartlett Giamatti

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

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.

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.

No one man is superior to the game.

There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The professionals must set a good example.

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.