Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

[Referring to Jack Kemp:] … a football player who has played too much without his helmet.

While the U.S. government is unlikely to ever limit the number of football games, plenty of parents are refusing to let their children play the sport due to the risk of head injuries.

I would bet you that even though people think I absorbed an inordinate number of head injuries, I'd say relative to the number of guys who have played this game, I would say that my head injuries were relatively small.

As long as we're wearing helmets and shoulder pads - there's collisions between these big, physical, fast guys - head injuries are going to be a part of it.

My son was a goalkeeper in soccer, and he luckily never had much head trauma. He never had any concussions or anything. I really wanted him to play football, but now I'm thankful he didn't.

The way football is being played currently, that I have seen, it's dangerous. It's dangerous and it could impact their long-term mental health. You only get one brain.

They're on the right road, but there's a long way to go on concussions, not only in the NFL, but college football, high school football and all football.

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

The truth is, what Americans enjoy about football is much of what makes the sport dangerous. However, I believe there must be a way to find the art of success and vitality in football, without the driving the level of impact that causes serious risk of head trauma, paralysis and other life-changing injuries.

You've got to be careful of guys trying to chop-block you. You know, running backs, the receivers. You've got to just hope that your knees are fine and you can avoid those chop blocks.

Boxing is a great example of it, but in football, sometimes you're taking greater hits than boxers. When you have one man going full speed against another man, and those heads are colliding, it's just the fact of science you're going to have results.

It's a part of football, you get concussed, you gotta keep on playing. You can't get afraid to go across the middle any more than you were at the beginning.

I would advise kids not to play any sports, such as tackle football, where they are exposed to repeated blows to the head.

I wouldn't let my children play football.

I'm not in the business to get hit and take concussions.

My experience over my five years at Wisconsin and my one year in the NFL was that there were times where I couldn't play the game safely. There are positive measures we can take... but on a lead play, on a power play, there's violence.

My opinion, football is the most dangerous sport there is. After that, I'll give it to probably boxing.

Football has always been violent. In the early days of the game, they didn't wear hard helmets. They wore soft helmets, which were just designed to protect the ears. In the '40s and '50s they began to introduce hard helmets, which provided much more protection against things like skull fractures.

Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.

When I first started playing football, a headache was called a 'headache.' And now it's called 'a concussion.'

Athletes, coaches and parents today are increasingly aware of the danger of concussion, and this awareness influences decisions about buying new and reconditioned football helmets.

To recognize that head injuries were as essential a part of football as they are of boxing would be to erase the fine distinction on which the game's respectability rested.

He played football too long without a helmet.

I cannot dislike him [Gerald R. Ford] personally—he's cordial and gracious. But he's consistently wrong and consistency is a virtue of small minds. He's never proposed a constructive solution to anything.

He [Gerald Ford] has a slow mind, but he has backbone.