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"At least, I got robbed by one of the best in the business. It’s like if you were a trainman in the old days and Jesse James held you up. You know you’ve been robbed by the best highwayman in the business."
"And then, too, there was the shared experience, already permanently fixed in memory, of Roberto Clemente playing a kind of baseball that none of us had ever seen before—throwing and running and hitting at something close to the level of absolute perfection, playing to win but also playing the game almost as if it were a form of punishment for everyone else on the field."

Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker was a Puerto Rican professional baseball player who played 18 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Pittsburgh Pirates, primarily as a right fielder. On December 31, 1972, Clemente was killed when his Douglas DC-7 airplane, which he had chartered for a flight to take and deliver emergency relief goods for the survivors of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua,
"At least, I got robbed by one of the best in the business. It’s like if you were a trainman in the old days and Jesse James held you up. You know you’ve been robbed by the best highwayman in the business."
"Before I threw the ball I prayed a little bit to God: "Please let this pitch be in a good spot for him not to hit it too hard." I think I was lucky enough to throw the ball in a good spot. It was a ground ball out. I remember one time in Pittsburgh – I struck him out three times. I think that was the greatest day in my life."
"When he was throwing to third, his throw was low enough to hit the cutoff and still get to third in the air. Coming home sometimes, he’d miss the cutoff man and try to get it all the way to the plate. Didn’t hurt him because he got it there quicker than most people. Roberto was one of the very few right fielders who could field the ball with the runner rounding first and throw behind that runner, without him taking second. He threw out quite a few guys that way."
"What I did was mild compared to what Durocher did to Conlan. I dont see how what I did can be called more serious than the Durocher incident. I had good reason to lose my head. That was the second time they call me out on a play I thought I had beat. Thats enough to make anybody mad."
"I am having a plaque put on the front of my house. It will say, "To God, Mother, Father and Baseball."
"Clemente and Ted Williams are the only two batters I ever saw who get good wood on the ball almost every time up. Every ball he hits seems shot out of a cannon."
"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."
"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."
"We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that philosophy of education which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool."
"I cant read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldnt read the proletarian crap that came out in the 30s; again you had sentimentalism — the poor oppressed workers."
"An [hypertext] encyclopaedia will be an overall attempt by the knowledgeable, the learned societies or anyone else, to represent the state-of-the-art in their field. An encyclopaedia will be a living document, as up to date as it can be, instantly accessible at any time. It will contain carefully authored explanations and summaries of the subject, as well as computer-generated indexes of literature. A reference to a paper from the encyclopaedia conveys authority and acceptance by academic society. A measure of a paper’s standing may be conveyed by the number of links it is away from an encyclopaedia."
"One of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi were replaced by modi significandi et intelligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, words become useful signs. ... To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of . Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world."