John Thorn Quotes

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

Baseball, my son, is the cornerstone of civilization.

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.

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.

As American as an apple is and as American as baseball is, they don't go together. You can't be chewing an apple at a baseball game. You've got to let go of the diet that day.

The whole of our national sport is not doing very well.

I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S.

You can't say that being a fan is more serious, because players are trying to do better in order to get paid better.

The time has come to disregard the exemption. Baseball is no longer a sport.

Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.

The self-image of many contemporary sportswriters seems to depend on maintaining that were it not for sports, athletes would be pumping gas, if they were not sticking up the gas station.

This is America, man. To not have football would be un-American. It's part of our society, like soccer in Brazil.

It's time to cut off visas for foreign baseball players and return our national pastime to Americans.

I never followed baseball very much. As a kid, I never followed sports.

The NBA (National Basketball Association) is never just a business. It's always business. It's always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal.

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance -- physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its ''national pastime'' pedestal in less than fifteen years.

Basketball is a game. Baseball is a religion. Baseball is American.

Baseball is our national game.

They (Americans) have their national game, baseball - which is cricket played with a strong American accent - and they have a national language, entirely their own, unlike any other language spoken on the earth.

Baseball, like some other sports, poses as a sacred institution dedicated to the public good, but it is actually a big, selfish business with a ruthlessness that many big businesses would never think of displaying.

There is a very special place in the Australian psyche for sport. It is one of the pillars of the Australian way of life. You don't really understand what makes the Australian nation tick unless you understand the great affection Australians have for sport.

Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.

Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all of the professional patriots with all their cheap words.