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

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.

If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.

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

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.

Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

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

The gods play games with men as balls.

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

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

If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.

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.