Nowadays, when a pitcher gets a ball close to the hitter, the hitter c — Casey Stengel

"Its a good likeness of The Dutchman. Its perfect the way they have him holding a bat in his big hands. He was good with the bat but he was a terror with that glove, too. And my, how he could run the bases. Come to think of it, he was as good a ball player as I ever saw. Maybe the best. John McGraw always said Wagner was the greatest and Im inclined to agree with him. He was certainly the best I ever played against. Wagner was a huge man with huge hands. He could cover ground and he could throw. Amazing thing about him was his arm. It was only as good as the runner. If you were an average runner, hed just beat you with his throw. And if you were fast, hed just beat you again."

"Ive been talking only of some of the things Wagner did in the field. But he was a terror with that bat. The only other right-handed batter I could compare him with was Rogers Hornsby. Wagner could hit line drives into right field all day long. And when you started to shade him toward right field, hed flip that bat, fake the third baseman into a bunt and hit it past him. And how he could run, too, even with his bowlegs. Honus had as much baseball instinct as I ever saw in a player. It was an education to play against him and a delight to watch him."

"Now the secret to successful managing is to break down your club. The first 15 guys you dont have to bother with. They are always playing and dont need the manager. The next five play only occasionally, so you got to keep buttering them up. The last five you gotta watch all the time because theyre plotting to get you fired."

"Oh yes, THAT Robason. Well, I seen Mr. Paige and I seen Rogan and I seen Mr. Josh Gibson, did you ever see that centerfield wall in Pittsburgh? Well, he hit one-out-of-three over it and I would have to say Mr. Robason shouldnt think he was the only man was brought in the big leagues was a wizard, why, he hit the lousiest popup I ever seen in a World Series [...] he, this wizard Mr. Robason hit the ball clear to the pitchers mound and Mr. Billy Martin catches it and we beat Mr. Robasons team for the fourth time in five. And the time they beat us, he wasnt in the lineup, he took the day off in the seventh game, you could look it up, so its possible a college education doesnt always help you if you cant hit a lefthanded changeup as far as the shortstop, but Im not bragging, you understand, as I dont have a clear notion myself about atomics and physics."

"There comes a time at least once in every mans life, and Ive had plenty of them."

"Maybe, but I dont have another life to live to wait around for it."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"Todays paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery."