Bill Maher Quotes

Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they're doing for the money.

I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it's fundamentally a form of entertainment.

Players today are concerned about the money, but the large dollars only go to those players who are the best.

If you offer athletes stipends, then you're into pay-for-play, and that's the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model for a sports-entertainment industry. It wasn't in tennis. It wasn't in the Olympics. And it's not in big-time college sports.

It drives me crazy when guys making $30 million are complaining about playing basketball two days in a row.

These days, you can watch many different sports; you are saturated with it 24 hours a day. And young boys all want to be footballers because you don't even need to be that good, and you can still earn £100,000 a week.

It's sad when a MMA fighter talks to an NFL or NBA player about how much money they make. That's embarrassing. You tell them how much you make and they laugh.

My cousin got wrapped up in the NBA lifestyle and threw parties at my house all the time. So I got wrapped up in it, too.

Professional sports, in of itself, is a fantasy, for the majority of the population.

People complain that pro athletes make a lot of money; but what they don't understand is that we need a lot of money because we spend a lot of money.

If you're looking to be a professional athlete on the top tier of any sport, my best advice is to put everything you have into it. If you're not, somebody else is. It's got to be all or nothing.

Some people tell me that we professional players are soccer slaves. Well, if this is slavery, give me a life sentence.

Jimmy Connors plays two tennis matches and winds up with $850,000, and Muhammad Ali fights for one bout and winds up with five million bucks. Me, I play 190 games--if you count exhibitions -- and I'm overpaid!

Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?

Losing is the bane and bugbear of every professional athlete's existence, but in baseball the monster seems to hang closer than in other sports, its chilly claws and foul breath palpable around the neck hairs of the infielder bending for his crosshand scoop or the reliever slipping his first two fingers off-center on the ball seams before delivering his two-and-two cut fastball.

This is Rickey calling on behalf of Rickey. Rickey wants to play baseball.

I criticize the NFL in many ways, but I think it's made great strides. I think college basketball, great strides. College football means so much to alumni, doesn't it? It sort of represents the school. It's when you go back; it's at the beginning of the school year.

It hasn't yet materialized that I went into sports management, but I haven't ruled it out yet, either. I only half-jokingly remarked that I'd love to be the commissioner of the NFL. But as I recently told current Commissioner Roger Goodell, that job looked a lot more appealing when I was struggling with the Russians and the Iranians everyday.

Nadal's the best player in history on [clay], and he is one of the best-ever players that played this game.

I know that this is sport first and business second, and people have to do what's right for them.

The rock'n'roll lifestyle really is available to anybody that's got money. Honestly. Once you get money, if you interview a hundred people with money, they'll all sound like rock stars.

Other sports culminate at different times of the year, but the NFL is in the fourth quarter - that's where the money is.

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.

My father thought sport was something fun - he didn't know it was a way to make money.

On today's athletes: I wish I could turn back the clock a little bit so I'd have a chance to cut it up with those guys.