Richard Ben Cramer Quotes

Sports is a unique thing in our country. It's so influential. It's almost like a sacrament for religion.

Joe DiMaggio was the greatest all-around player I ever saw. His career can not be summed up in numbers and awards. It might sound corny, but he had a profound and lasting impact on the country.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on the American people than any other institution.

I don't know what anybody else in the world would want to thank America for, but man, it [jazz] works. What I like about it - and what public health people ought to like about it - it's safe sex.

Character is everything. The reason people watch sports entertainment is to see people who are larger than life, but at the same time, there's something real about them.

Music is power.

My dad hit 152 home runs and that's the person I wanted to be like. My hero growing up.

Music dictates culture, and culture dictates music; they go hand in hand.

George Steinbrenner forever changed baseball and hopefully someday we will see him honored in baseball's Hall of Fame as one of the great figures in the history of sports.

The fans, man, the fans have a little different way of thinking. They really applaud the spirit of fighters, and that put a huge influence on the type of energy I fought with, rather than if I won or lost. America's a real win-or-lose culture, where with the Japanese, fighting with spirit is enough.

I grew up watching American films, listening to American music, and it's a big contribution to the rest of the world. I mean, American jazz, for me, is the best thing culturally that America has produced.

For me, football is more than a sport, just look at the impact it has on society.

I didn't really know who Cassius Clay was. I just wanted to show America through a heavyweight championship fight. Ever since my childhood, I'd been fascinated by the way the whole country becomes polarised around this event.

I love the individual characters that cricket produces and, more than most other sports, the unlikely heroes.

This is more in regards to celebrities. What we've got to understand is that we are the influencers of the hip-hop culture, the black culture. We are the way out, you feel what I'm sayin'? As far as who we look to and where we get stuff from - hip-hop culture is influencing the world, really, but especially the black communities.

In my opinion, Spike Lee is a national cultural treasure - to the black community in particular but to America in general.

Celebrities may get all the attention in the glossies, but when athletes set an example, their words are far-reaching - deep into the inner cities, across Mid-western farmlands, up and down coasts.

Athletes have all the influence in the world. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say.

Gambhir behaves like he's a cross between Don Bradman & James Bond.

Music helps shape the way people think about the world and act in the world.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

I want to be remembered as a guy who transcended boxing.

Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.