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

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

Hunting is all that’s worth living for—all time is lost what is not spent in hunting—it is like the air we breathe—if we have it not we die—it’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt.

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.

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

The true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war.

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.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

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

Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.

Play, wherein persons of condition, especially ladies, waste so much of their time, is a plain instance to me that men cannot be perfectly idle; they must be doing something, for how else could they sit so many hours toiling at that which generally gives more vexation than delight to people whilst they are actually engaged in it?