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Quotes

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.

—George Orwell, 1945

These useless men ought to be cut up and served at a banquet. I really believe that athletes have less intelligence than swine.

—Dio Chrysostom, c. 95

I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.

—Anna Sewell, 1877

One great reason why many children abandon themselves wholly to silly sports and trifle away all their time insipidly is because they have found their curiosity baulked and their inquiries neglected.

—John Locke, 1693

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.

—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987

Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.

—Juvenal, c. 121

A win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.

—E.M. Forster, 1919

Courage and grace is a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is in the bullring.

—Marlene Dietrich, 1962

Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.

—George Washington, 1783

The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.

—Molière, 1670

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world: it gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. The picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

—Susan B. Anthony, 1896

We cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were not allowed all the freedom of the boy in romping, climbing, swimming, playing whoop and ball.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838