Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

For as one star another far exceeds, So souls in heaven are placed by their deeds.

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game. He really showed me something. Struck out three times. Made an error that lost the game. Parents were throwing things at our car and swearing at us as we drove off. Gosh, I was proud.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

I didn’t mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

Clothes if they are not well cut, you can kill nobody. A building poorly built can kill people. It’s a much more difficult work. I would not compare myself with that.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

When I came up to bat with three men on and two outs in the ninth, I looked in the other team’s dugout and they were already in street clothes.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

Even though the risks of death are higher driving than flying, many people would rather drive simply because they feel they have more control driving. The facts are that only a few hundred people die a year flying, and 44,000 are killed a year driving.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It’s like stealing a two-year-old.

How do you catch a knuckleball? You wait until it stops rolling, then go pick it up.

I hate what I look like on TV, and I want to look better, and nothing makes the mothers more jealous.

The only difference between Benito and Bad Bunny is 16 million followers on Instagram. And the money that Bad Bunny has in the bank. Benito had, like, $7. The numbers are different, but I’m still the same. Even my insecurities remain the same.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

When I looked at the third base coach, he turned his back on me.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.

There is only a finger’s difference between a wise man and a fool.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.

Before broadcasting for 50-some years, I did TV, played 10 years in the big leagues, won a world championship – and played a big part in that, too, letting the Cardinals inject me with hepatitis. Takes a big man to do that.

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

‚Kiss Land‘ is like a horror movie.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.