Bill Klem Quotes

Great progress was made when arbitration treaties were concluded in which the contracting powers pledge in advance to submit all conflicts to an arbitration court, treaties which not only specify the composition of the court, but also its procedure.

As we all know, Cooperstown is the home of baseball. One of the many duties of the home plate umpire is to make sure that the runner touches home. Well, if you're a true baseball fan, you need to visit Cooperstown. This is home.

Compulsory arbitration is a practical instrument of pacification and, as such, it can and should be enacted by the Hague Conference.

Through the centuries, men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and maximum of reason.

In the olden days, the umpire didn't have to take any courses in mind reading. The pitcher told you he was going to throw at you.

Make sure you never, never argue at night. You just lose a good night's sleep, and you can't settle anything until morning anyway.

Boys, I'm one of those umpires that misses 'em every once in a while so if it's close, you'd better hit it.

MLB has become overly active, actively involved in the game, the on-the-field game. They're trying to run the game the way they want to and you just have to play along with it, deal with it.

The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.

You have to listen to adversaries and keep looking for that point beyond which it's against their interests to keep on disagreeing or fighting.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

Clean fighting solves everything. It ends all bad blood and any ill feelings people have. That's my thoughts.

If we examine the Hague Convention carefully, we see that it considers the offer of good offices a duty of every nation. In other words, such offers should be made whenever a dispute becomes critical and threatens to explode into war.

At home, a man is entitled to raise his voice maybe once a year, if something really gets under his skin. At work, it's different. I raise my voice all the time. Not out of malice, but to get things right. It's never personal.

When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?

I can do the PR thing until the cows come home. That's my nature. I never want to upset anybody.

First of all, you want umpires to call what they see. In the case of fair or foul, the smartest thing is to call the ball fair. Because if it's called foul and ruled fair, where do we put the runners?

Mediators do not choose the conflicts they became involved in, but the parties to the conflict choose the mediator. Their participation as intermediaries is based on the trust of all the conflicting parties.

We are fighting in our own house. It is useless to live on burned ruins.

I have always done my best to keep my young men quiet, but some will not listen, and since the fighting began I have not been able to keep them all at home.

For many years I have known a good deal about international arbitrations and I have never known of one in which both nations in controversy did not benefit more from having the question between them settled than either gained from a favorable judgment or lost by an unfavorable one.

We have to get it into our heads once and for all that we cannot settle disputes by eliminating human beings.

All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.

We can prevent fighting by limiting weapons or finding nonviolent ways to end disputes.

I deal with conflicts that irritate people and give them stress, like the dispute over a car payment. I can resolve those cases in a moment.