GENERAL SPORTS OBSERVATIONS
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George Orwell: "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting."
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Homer Simpson-The Simpsons: "If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls' sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such and such."
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Justice Earl Warren: "I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."
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Rita Rudner: "Men forget everything, women remember everything. That's why men need instant replay in sports. They've already forgotten what happened."
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Robert Benchley: "An ardent supporter of the home town team should go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter what happens."
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Howard Cosell: "Sports is human life in microcosm."
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Unknown: "There is no "I" in TEAM."
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Unknown, in response to the saying that "there is no "I" in TEAM: "But, there is an ME."
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Unknown, in response to the saying that "there is no "I" in TEAM: "There ain't no "WE" either."
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Charles de Gaulle, on war, but pertinent to sports teams as well: "The graveyards are full of indispensable people."
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Michael Ventre, L.A. Daily News: "I think my favorite sport in the Olympics is the one in which you make your way through the snow, you stop, you shoot a gun, and then you continue on. In most of the world, it is known as the biathlon, except in New York City, where it is known as winter."
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Alistair Cooke: "Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own."
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Robert Morley: "The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel."
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Wanderley Luxemburgo: "A player who conjugates a verb in the first person singular cannot be part of the squad, he has to conjugate the verb in the first person plural. We. We want to conquer. We are going to conquer. Using the word "I" when you're in a group makes things complicated."
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George Bernard Shaw: "It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls."
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James Reston: "There isn't a single professional sports season now that doesn't go on at least a month too long. Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both."
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Al McGuire: "Winning is overrated. The only time it is really important is in surgery and war."
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Jerome Holtzman: "Losing is the great American sin."
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Roger Bannister: "The essence of sports is that while you're doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it."
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Emil Zatopek: "An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head."
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Joe Kinnear, comparing finances and resources in high-dollar and low-dollar sports teams : "It's like going into a nuclear war with bows and arrows."
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George Orwell: "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting... there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators."
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Robert Lynd: "It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans."
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Don Murray: "People understand contests. You take a bunch of kids throwing rocks at random and people look askance, but if you go and hold a rock-throwing contest - people understand that."
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Dick Young: "Fans are the only ones who really care. There are no free-agent fans."
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Theodore Roosevelt, although not specifically related to sports, this quote has a lot of relevance: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered with failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
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