Quote
"I hear people say I swing at bad pitches. What is a bad pitch? If I can hit it, its not a bad pitch."
"I knew Roberto was a man – perhaps the only man – who could give enough of himself to make this work. The city agreed to give us Sixto Escobar Stadium as a staging area. I put Roberto on my show and he told them: "Bring what you can. Bring medicine ... clothes ... food ... shoes ... bring yourself to help us load ... trust me – whatever you bring we will use."

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,
"I hear people say I swing at bad pitches. What is a bad pitch? If I can hit it, its not a bad pitch."
"If Roberto Clemente could sing, he would make Harry Belafonte wish he could hit."
"The American League must be that fountain of youth they talk about. A lot of National League pitchers did pretty good in the American League this year."
"He has these huge, strong hands. People always thought that because he hit with such power, he was this big guy. He wasnt, especially by todays standards. He came into spring training at 185 pounds. By the end of the season, he was 181. The power came from those hands."
"I played with Willie Mays and I played with Roberto Clemente, and what I see in Barry is the same ability I saw in Willie and Roberto. I see a guy who trusts himself at the plate and in the field. If I managed against Barry, I wouldnt let him beat me. I wouldnt give him the opportunity."
"I am having a plaque put on the front of my house. It will say, "To God, Mother, Father and Baseball."
"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."
"I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hairs-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up — he had judged. The horror! He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth — the strange commingling of desire and hate."
"The Spanish Republic did not find itself free of obligations. For the most part the leaders were Freemasons. Before their duty to their country came their obligations to the Grand Orient. In my opinion, Freemasonry, with all its international influence, is the organization principally responsible for the political ruin of Spain, as well as the murder of Calvo Sotelo, who was executed in accordance with orders from the Grand Secretary of Freemasonry in Geneva."
"There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness."
"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."
"Well buy a lot of clothes, but we dont really need em Things we buy to cover up whats inside Cause they made us hate ourself and love their wealth."