My Turn at Bat : The Story of My Life (1970), p. 7
Variant: All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, "There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived".
On Ted Williams, as quoted in "Here's the Pitch" by Frank Finch, in The Los Angeles Times (June 5, 1958), p. C2
As quoted on the official website http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/web/libraries_local_history_figures.htm#William_Herschel of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.
From "Billy Williams: Invisible Iron Man," in Baseball Stars of 1971 (March 1971), edited by Ray Robinson, p. 106
Sports-related
“For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Van Helsing.”
Dracula, to Van Helsing, who has discovered his secret
Dracula (1931)
“The greatest American who ever lived has been shot down and killed.”
Private conversation regarding the death of George Lincoln Rockwell (1967), quoted in The Rise of David Duke (1994) by Tyler Bridges
Source: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements
"Robert Anton Wilson on Wilhelm Reich" (March 1995)
Context: He {Wilhelm Reich} had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.
Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned.
Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue.
When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation.
Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §5 (p. 61)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
