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Quotes

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.

—Robert Smith Surtees, 1843

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

—Reggie Jackson, 1976

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

—John Donne, 1623

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

The gods play games with men as balls.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

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?

—Tacitus, c. 100

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

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

—Bion of Smyrna, c. 100 BC

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

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

—P.G. Wodehouse, 1929

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.

—Thomas Gouge, 1672

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.

—Ira Berkow, 1987

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

—Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1908