Quotes about play
page 40

Jonah Goldberg photo
André Maurois photo
River Phoenix photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Richard Francis Burton photo
Samuel Bowles photo
Pauline Kael photo
Joe Strummer photo
Larry Niven photo

““Do you play games of chance?”
“Emphatically yes. The process of living is a game of chance. To avoid chance is insanity.””

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

There Is a Tide (p. 206)
Short fiction, Tales of Known Space (1975)

Roberto Clemente photo

“I hit many what you call the "bad bol" pitches, and get good wood. The bol' travel like bullet. That remind me, I hit 565 foote hum-rum in Chicaga last year; the bol' disappear from centerfield, and Raj Hornsby tell me it longest drive he ever saw hit out of Wrigley Field. The bol' feel good on the bat but I feel bad at heart, when no writer with our team play up the big drive. I feel effort not appreciated.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted by Bill Nunn, Jr. in The New Pittsburgh Courier (June 25, 1960); reproduced in Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero https://books.google.com/books?id=jIhcvFs-k1cC&pg=PA98 (2006) by David Maraniss, p. 98
Comment: Clemente is not entirely correct. At least nationally (via TSN's weekly Pirates report), one veteran Pirates beat writer did do his part to publicize the blast. See Les Biederman (5/27/59 and 6/6/66) in Media, as well as Ernie Banks in Opponents.
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1960</big>

Francis Escudero photo
Karl Dönitz photo

“Our losses…have reached an intolerable level. The enemy air force played a decisive role in inflicting these high losses.”

Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) President of Germany; admiral in command of German submarine forces during World War II

May 24, 1943, quoted in "A Time for Courage: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-1945" - Page 449 - by John Terraine - History - 1985.

Jerome Bettis photo

“I played this game to win a championship. I am a champion, and I think The Bus’ last stop is here in Detroit.”

Jerome Bettis (1972) Former American football running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers

Bettis announcing his retirement following the Steelers’ Super Bowl victory in his hometown of Detroit (February 5, 2006http://www.hwwilson.com/_home/bios/1992060806.htm

Miles Davis photo

“I love Pops, I love the way he sings, the way he plays - everything he does, except when he says something against modern-jazz music.”

Miles Davis (1926–1991) American jazz musician

In Playboy to Alex Haley (1962); also in [Milestones: The music and times of Miles Davis since 1960, Jack, Chambers, Beech Tree Books, 1983, 9780688046460, 209], [The Playboy Interviews, Alex, Haley, Murray, Fisher, Ballantine, 1993, 9780345383006, 15], [The Miles Davis companion: four decades of commentary, Gary, Carner, Gary, Carner, Schirmer Books, 1996, 9780028646121, 19], and in [Miles Davis and American Culture, Missouri Historical Society Press Series, Gerald Lyn, Early, Missouri History Museum, 2001, 9781883982386, 205]
1960s

“From its inception, the fascist arrangement has attempted to create the illusion of a mass society in which the traditional capitalist ruling class would continue to play its leading role.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 121

Neil Young photo
Alfred Brendel photo
Paul Krugman photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“Jackie, what is the matter with you? You did not lose this ball game. We all lost it. No one man loses any ball game. You remember that. You are a good ball player. We need you to play shortstop. Come now, get dressed, let's go out and have a steak.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

English translation of pep talk given on August 21, 1971, after Hernandez' 6th-inning miscue—scored as a hit—had contributed significantly to Cincinnati's 6-3 come-from-behind victory over Pittsburgh http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1971/B08210CIN1971.htm, as quoted in "Playing Games: Bad Day in Cincy" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=iG8mAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Bm0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=5765%2C1664013&dq=clemente-began-talk-spanish by Charley Feeney, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Tuesday, September 28, 1971), p. 23
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Ryan C. Gordon photo
Robert Parish photo

“Meadowlark inspired me to play for a long time. I thought, 'If he could do it, I can do it.' The legacy that Meadowlark leaves is something that every child and adult can benefit from.”

Robert Parish (1953) American basketball player

Quoted in Trust Your Next Shot: A Guide to a Life of Joy by Meadowlark Lemon (Ascend Books, 2010), p. III https://books.google.it/books?id=_UT_2hRSc9wC&pg=PR3.

Taliesin photo
Kenneth Grahame photo
E.M. Forster photo
Jimmy Buffett photo
Joanna Newsom photo
Henry Kissinger photo

“Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

The End of the Road (1982), Ch. 25 "Years of Upheaval"
1980s

Steve Jobs photo

“Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
Jobs: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.
Playboy: Meaning what?
Jobs: It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1985, as quoted in “Steve Jobs Imagines 'Nationwide' Internet in 1985 Interview” https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-imagines-nationwide-internet-in-1985-intervi-1671246589, Matt Novak, 12/15/14 2:20pm Paleofuture, Gizmodo.
1980s

George W. Bush photo
Johan Cruyff photo

“Who am I supporting? I am Dutch but I support the football that Spain is playing. Spain's style is the style of Barcelona. Spain, a replica of Barça, is the best publicity for football.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

Cruyff wrote in his weekly column for the Barcelona-based newspaper El Periodico, prior to the 2010 FIFA World Cup final match ( Goal.com, 11 July 2010 http://www.goal.com/en-gb/news/2890/world-cup-2010/2010/07/11/2018367/from-ajax-to-barcelona-holland-vs-spain-world-cup-2010-final).

Bon Scott photo

“I'm 33…before AC/DC I've played in a lot of bands in Australia. You're never too old to rock and roll.”

Bon Scott (1946–1980) Rock musician

From Best, December 1979.

Rachel Weisz photo

“As a child in North London it never crossed my mind that I would ever play the Wicked Witch of the East.”

Rachel Weisz (1970) English actress

Source: hellomagazine.com http://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities/2013030911512/rachel-weisz-us-interview/

Thomas Szasz photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
Rudolf Rocker photo
Keith Richards photo
Margaret Cho photo
Robert Jordan photo
Carlos Zambrano photo

“I was real, real sad about that play. Four more outs to throw a no-hitter … I was really sad. I saw the play on the field and thought he was out. But he's human (umpire Bill Miller) and anybody can make a mistake.”

Carlos Zambrano (1981) Venezuelan baseball pitcher

Author Unknown, Cubs 4, Arizona 1 http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/recap?gid=230822129, Yahoo! Sports, Retreived on June 14, 2007
2003

Dick Clark photo

“You can't make a hit record out of nothing. … It's baseless to think you can make any recording a hit, just by playing it over and over and over again.”

Dick Clark (1929–2012) American radio personality

Responding to payola charges, Pop Chronicles, Show 12 - Big Rock Candy Mountain: Rock 'n' roll in the late fifties. Part 2 http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19761/m1/, interview recorded 3.11.1968 http://www.library.unt.edu/music/special-collections/john-gilliland/index-to-interviews.

Anthony Burgess photo

“I remember an old proverb. It says that youth thinks itself wise just as drunk men think themselves sober. Youth is not wise! Youth knows nothing about life! Youth knows nothing about anything except for massive cliches which for the most part through the media of pop songs are just foisted on them by middle-age entrepreneurs and exploiters who should know better. When we start thinking that pop music is close to God, then we'll think pop music is aesthetically better than it is. And it's only the aesthetic value of pop music that we're really concerned. I mean the only way we can judge Wagner or Beethoven or any other composer is aesthetically. We don't regard Wagner or Beethoven nor Shakespeare or Milton as great teachers. When we start claiming for Lennon or McCartney or Maharishi or any other of these pop prophets the ability to transport us to a region where God becomes manifest then I see red. We're satisfied with our little long playing record, ten pop numbers or thereabouts a side. This is great art, we've been told this by the great pundits of our age. And in consequence why should we bother to learn? There's nothing more delightful than to be told: "You don't have to learn, my boy. There's nothing in it. Modern art? There's nothing in it." When you're told these things you sit down with a sigh of relief: "Thank God I don't have to learn, I don't have to travel, I don't have to exert myself in the slightest. I am what I am. Youth is youth. Pop is pop. There's no need to progress. There's no need to do anything. Let us sit down, smoke our marijuana (an admirable thing in itself but not the end of anything), let us listen to our records and life has become a single moment. And the single moment is eternity. We're with God. Finis!”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Pop Music

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo
Erik Naggum photo
Theodor Reuss photo
John Romero photo
Jack Buck photo
Sandra Fluke photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Brett Favre photo

“With each game I play, with each season I play, I'm running out of chances… you're never guaranteed next year. You're never guaranteed the next game. You have to seize the opportunity when it's there in front of you.”

Brett Favre (1969) former American football quarterback

[Judy, Batista, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E7D91338F93AA15752C0A9629C8B63&n=Top/News/Sports/Pro%20Football/National%20Football%20League/Green%20Bay%20Packers, PRO FOOTBALL: NOTEBOOK; Favre Knows That Time Is Quickly Running Out, The New York Times, January 29, 2004, 2007-11-12]

Roger Manganelli photo
Vyjayanthimala photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Rio Ferdinand photo
Roberto Clemente photo

“I've had two lives: the first one when I was born in Puerto Rico in 1935 [sic] and the second when I came to Pittsburgh to play baseball in 1955. I have been very lucky and I feel gifted to be able to play well.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Addressing fans at Three Rivers Stadium on Roberto Clemente Day, as quoted in "Pirates, Puerto Rico Pay Clemente Honors" http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/12807951/ by Vito Stellino (UPI), in The El Paso Herald-Post (July 25, 1970)
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“Nobody talks much that doesn't say unwise things, — things he did not mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. I.

“You doubt where you're going, you doubt the way you shave in the morning and even the way you talk to people. Looking back on my past, I think that when you are out of form I attribute it to how I am in my life. I guess it was a reflection of the way I was playing my cricket, you know, I was inconsistent.”

Lou Vincent (1978) New Zealand cricketer

When asked about his career and self-doubt. Quoted in [Hanging out with Lou Vincent, Michele Hewitson, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/cricket/news/article.cfm?c_id=29&objectid=10434215&pnum=3, The New Zealand Herald, 2008-06-05, 2008-06-05]

“It is generally assumed that men are damaged in their capacity for closeness and intimacy. If intimacy is defined as a loving closeness with another person, then it is usually true that the early conditioning of men to be performers and competitors in the impersonal competitive world limits their intimacy capacity. Women are assumed to have a greater capacity for intimacy than men because they express caring emotions and allow themselves to be dependent and close in relationships more easily. Yet, a closer look will provide a different perspective.

True intimacy is love and closeness based on knowledge of the inner reality and inner experience of the other. However, in romantic relationships, closeness ends or is put into crisis when men describe honestly their inner experiences to women. Women assail the relationship behavior of men and men acknowledge what they are told. Rarely is the opposite true. Men accept the reality of women more than women accept the reality of men.

The fact that a woman's priority is placed on personal needs bears no relationship to a genuine capacity for intimacy. To be loved and known, and to be fully comfortable expressing one's personal self, are two major components of intimacy. There are few men who have received that from a woman. The opposite holds true. A woman's love for a man is contingent on his participating in her romantic fantasy of what he and the relationship should be. Few men risk challenging or undermining that fantasy. Instead, they play by the rules of romance even when it feels uncomfortable, knowing that being loved by her is fragile and easily broken once he reveals his resistances and unromantic feelings.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Why Women Are Also Incapable of Intimacy, pp. 120&ndash;121
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh photo
Douglas Coupland photo
Harpo Marx photo

“I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist - I played by ear.”

Harpo Marx (1888–1964) American comedian

book, Harpo Speaks

George Macaulay Trevelyan photo
Tad Williams photo

“Everyone at the Hayholt had seemed obsessed with the empty ritual of power, something Miriamele had lived with for so long that it held no interest for her. It was like watching a confusing game played by bad-tempered children.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 2, Chapter 4, “A Thousand Leaves, A Thousand Shadows” (p. 99).

“There are a lot of grown ups who, should be sent up to their rooms, and told they must stay there, until they learn they can play fair.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Hi Neigbour, Salam Neighbour"
For Whom The Troubadour Sings (2010)

Zakir Hussain (politician) photo
Scott Ritter photo

“One of the big problems is — and here goes the grenade — Israel. The second you mention the word "Israel," the nation Israel, the concept Israel, many in the American press become very defensive. We’re not allowed to be highly critical of the state of Israel. And the other thing we’re not allowed to do is discuss the notion that Israel and the notion of Israeli interests may in fact be dictating what America is doing, that what we’re doing in the Middle East may not be to the benefit of America’s national security, but to Israel’s national security. But, see, we don’t want to talk about that, because one of the great success stories out there is the pro-Israeli lobby that has successfully enabled themselves to blend the two together, so that when we speak of Israeli interests, they say, "No, we’re speaking of American interests."It’s interesting that AIPAC and other elements of the Israeli Lobby don’t have to register as agents of a foreign government. It would be nice if they did, because then we’d know when they’re advocating on behalf of Israel or they’re advocating on behalf of the United States of America.I would challenge The New York Times to sit down and do a critical story on Israel, on the role of Israel’s influence, the role that Israel plays in influencing American foreign policy. There’s nothing wrong with Israel trying to influence American foreign policy. Let me make that clear. The British seek to influence our foreign policy. The French seek to influence our foreign policy. The Saudis seek to influence our foreign policy. The difference is, when they do this and they bring American citizens into play, these Americans, once they take the money of a foreign government and they advocate on behalf of that foreign government, they register themselves as an agent of that government, so we know where they’re coming from. That’s all I ask the Israelis to do. Let us know where you’re coming from, because stop confusing the American public that Israel’s interests are necessarily America’s interests.I have to tell you right now, Israel has a viable, valid concern about Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. If I were an Israeli, I would be extremely concerned about Hezbollah, and I would want to do everything possible to nullify that organization. As an American, I will tell you, Hezbollah does not threaten the national security of the United States of America one iota. So we should not be talking about using American military forces to deal with the Hezbollah issue. That is an Israeli problem. And yet, you’ll see The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets confusing the issue. They want us to believe that Hezbollah is an American problem. It isn’t, ladies and gentleman. Hezbollah was created three years after Israel invaded Lebanon, not three years after the United States invaded Lebanon. And Hezbollah’s sole purpose was to liberate southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation. I’m not here to condone or sing high praises in virtue for Hezbollah. But I’m here to tell you right now, Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization that threatens the security of the United States of America.”

Scott Ritter (1961) American weapons inspector and writer

October 16, 2006
2006

Andriy Shevchenko photo
Jerome David Salinger photo

“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”

Mr. Spencer
Source: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Chapter 2

Paul Morphy photo
Jan Smuts photo
Kenneth Arrow photo
Adele (singer) photo
Anthony Trollope photo
Alexander Ovechkin photo
Claude McKay photo
John Banville photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Albert Camus photo
Walther Funk photo

“Ach! I know. If I were to play the Pathetique or the Moonlight Sonata for the high judges, they would let me off. But my defense unfortunately will not be musical.”

Walther Funk (1890–1960) German economist and politician

To Leon Goldensohn, March 31, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004 - Page 82

Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Julien Offray de La Mettrie photo
Paul Krugman photo
Frederick William Faber photo
Helen Hayes photo

“The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.”

Helen Hayes (1900–1993) actress

Source: On Reflection (1968), Ch. 14

Francis Marion Crawford photo
John Buchan photo