A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes
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As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre - except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places.
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It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table.
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Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process, where one rehearses constantly while acting, sits as a spectator at a play one directs, engages every part in order to keep the choices open and the shape alive for the student, so that the student may enter in, and begin to do what the teacher has done: make choices.
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Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.
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The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust.
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Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.
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Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field.
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A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.
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My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.
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To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.
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On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch -- engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.
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Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.
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On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.
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For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.
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There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.
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People will say I'm an idealist. I hope so.
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If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.
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There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball.
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All play aspires to the condition of paradise...through play in all its forms...we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden...always as removed, as an enclosed green place...Paradise is an ancient dream...It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.
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Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.
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You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
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The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is a sad end if a sorry episode. One of the game's greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. There is absolutely no deal for reinstatement.
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Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.
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I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism.
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I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.
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The professionals must set a good example.
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[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.
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Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.
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Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.
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Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.
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A. Bartlett Giamatti

- Born: April 4, 1938
- Died: September 1, 1989
- Occupation: Commissioner of Baseball