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

I do love cricket—it’s so very English.

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

Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.

A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.