"Sometimes I think there must be two Yogi Berras. There is the one who grew up on the Hill in St, Louis, whos been playing ball for the Yankees for fourteen years, has a beautiful wife named Carmen and three boys, Larry, Timmy, and Dale, and lives in a nice house in Montclair, N. J. Thats me. Then theres the one you read about in the papers who is a kind of a comic-strip character, like Lil Abner or Joe Palooka. [...] I dont know that Yogi at all, because he doesnt exist."
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra was an American professional baseball catcher who later took on the roles of manager and coach. He played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB), all but the last for the New York Yankees. He was an 18-time All-Star and won 10 World Series championships as a player—more than any other player in MLB history. Berra had a career batting average of .285, while hitting 35
"Lopat was the cutest of the gang, the easiest to catch because he had almost perfect control of every pitch at different speeds. He made batters impatient. They couldnt wait for what looked so easy to hit and theyd swing at his motion."
"We made too many of the wrong mistakes."
"The Bombers set a home run record and Yogi Berra, a vest-pocket immortal for the future, flailed past Lou Gehrig, a large, economy-size immortal from the past, in the runs-batted-in department. Yogi was the batting hero with the top average of .360 and that has to tickle everybody who knows him because Yogi is a delightful little guy. His ailing mother asked him to hit a couple of homers for her. "Ill try, Mom," said Yogi. He made no rash promises. He merely said hed do his best and his best was good enough. Hes such a sweet fellow that he couldnt even rub it into Don Newcombe when big Newk went to bat after Yogi had clouted his second homer of the finale. "I hit a pretty good pitch, Newk," said Yogi as he crouched behind the plate. Berra was trying to soften the pain. "Yes, you did," agreed Newk glumly."
"If the truth must be told, Id never even heard of Berra, but I figured that if he was worth fifty grand to Ottie he must be worth fifty grand to me. Thats why I turned him down. But one day Im in my office and the girl comes in to announce that Mr. Berra is outside to see me. "Berra?" I say to myself. "That must be the kid Ottie was trying to buy." So I tell her to show him in. So I waited for my first look at the prize package which was worth $50,000. The instant I saw him my heart sank and I wondered why I had been so foolish as to refuse to sell him. In bustled a stocky little guy in a sailor suit. He had no neck and his muscles were virtually busting the buttons off his uniform. He was one of the most unprepossessing fellows I ever set eyes on in my life. And the sailor suit accentuated every defect. Since then, though, Ive never regretted the move."
"He aint much to look at and he looks like hes doing everything wrong, but he can hit. He got two hits off us on wild pitches."
"Yogi had the fastest bat I ever saw. he could hit a ball late that was already past him, and take it out of the park. The pitchers were afraid of him because hed hit anything, so they didnt know what to throw. Yogi had them psyched out and he wasnt even trying to psyche them out."
"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!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"