John Thorn Quotes

The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.

Baseball is better with tradition, with history. Baseball is better with fans who care.

Major league baseball is about the history of the game. Baseball history is so important. It's so much more than money.

Baseball was the darling of all sports back then.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Without Cooperstown, you don't have baseball: Baseball is history.

Baseball is a public trust. Players turn over, owners turn over and certain commissioners turn over. But baseball goes on.

Baseball is just a game, obviously, but it means a lot to a lot of different people.

There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.

There's a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That's baseball.

I came up in 1941 and I played against men who played in the 1930s. I stayed until 1963 playing against men who will be playing in the 1970s. So I think I can feel qualified to say that baseball really was a great game, and baseball is really a great game, and baseball will always be a great game.

It was so strange. I knew that Josephine Baker had performed on the same stage but that night I felt it. Many of the same people who worked with Josephine Baker are still here. They know what they're doing. And that was a very comfortable feeling.

I like the catholicity in time: our tradition is one of 2,000 years.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

Since 1869, baseball has been doing pretty well.

Say this for big league baseball - it is beyond any question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

Baseball is the president tossing out the first ball of the season. And a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

The past is a present force.