Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

In T20, you don’t have time to get distracted – it’s so quick, you have to run around in the field, and while batting, you don’t actually think about anything else.

Once it gets down to single-digit games, you know the season’s end is approaching, and we’re all pretty physically tired.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.

Hatred is self-punishment.

Eight years ago, you may remember Hillary and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination. We battled for a year and a half. Let me tell you, it was tough, because Hillary was tough. I was worn out. She was doing everything I was doing, but just like Ginger Rogers, it was backwards in heels.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.

If you watch any good player, they’re using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They’re moving in many dimensions at once.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

If you’re entering anything where there’s an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can’t be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer… you’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference.

I think any activity you have your kids in, you’re all trying to live vicariously through them. And you’re jealous of the kid that’s naturally more talented or has the facility, the body, the genes, or the God-given talent. People get jealous of that.

When I won the Golden Gloves in 1960, that made me realize I had a chance. And when I won at the Olympics, that sealed it: I was the champ.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

The best football is always about expression of emotion. Always.

I was the one who took football off the back pages and put it on to page one.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

In an individual sport, yes, you have to win titles. Baseball’s different. But basketball, hockey? One person can control the tempo of a game, can completely alter the momentum of a series. There’s a lot of great individual talent.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.

I played a great horse yesterday! It took seven horses to beat him.

In India, people are really glued to the Premier League and La Liga.

I treated it like every day was my last day with a basketball.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures – they’re lying if they say they haven’t. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind – the product wasn’t distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

It obviously bothers people when Real Madrid win. It makes them jealous. There isn’t a level playing field.

My main focus is always to do well on the field for the Indian cricket team. When people say good things about me off the field, I am more than happy to accept them.

Eventually, all companies are replaced.

So like any football or basketball coach, you always always believe you’re going to win.

My first win feels better than a draw!

At the start of the season, there are 16 teams in the top division looking behind them, making sure they avoid relegation. The fear starts in the boardroom, comes down to managers and through to players. The fans sense it.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

I like to get out and get up the court, using my speed and aggressiveness toward the hoop.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

In my line of work, the enemy gets a vote.

As a coach, one thing that used to frustrate me was one player would make a bad decision, and that’s all you would read about in the papers all over the country. We have so many athletes do so many wonderful things for other people, and you never read about it.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

Every night on the court I give my all, and if I’m not giving 100 percent, I criticize myself.

I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head – big darkness, soon come – but every once in a while you get a fair chance to have it both ways, and the annual NCAA basketball Tournament is one of them.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

It’s what counts, isn’t it, on the Sunday, rather than pre-season testing. If you lock up, you do a little mistake, it’s nothing, but if you do it on Sunday, you lose a place or you have to box for a flat spot or something like that. It’s a much bigger problem.

At the end of 2003, my game was complete. Shooting, defense, using the dribble, transition, midrange stuff was all there. Then it was about fine-tuning and trying to improve in each area.

Sports are such a great teacher. I think of everything they’ve taught me: camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences.

You beat him verbally. You beat him mentally, and then finally, you beat him physically. That’s the three ways to beat a man.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

Well, I mean, to me, I think my ultimate – my ultimate goal is winning championships and – and I understand that me going down as one of the greats will not happen until I, you know, win a championship.

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

If someone told me I could play two Asian Cup finals, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.