Charlie Pierce Quotes

As long as we're having contact and as long as there are collisions, there's going to be head injuries. What the long-term consequences are of that, we're beginning to learn, and that definitely will have an impact on the game as we know it.

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.

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.

But now there are more concussions due to not being used to the hard hitting.

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

Football is entertainment in which the audience is expected to delight in gladiatorial action that a growing portion of the audience knows may cause the players degenerative brain disease.

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

He [Gerald R. Ford] played too much football with his helmet off.

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.

I wouldn't let my children play football.

I never had a concussion playing rugby.

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.

Dementia pugilistica was discovered in 1928... And we still have boxing. Football will continue.

A child who plays a game of football for one season without any documented concussion - several months after that season, if you subject his brain to sophisticated psychological testing and radiological testing, functional MRIs, there is evidence of brain damage.

Anybody going into boxing already has brain damage.

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.

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

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

Of course, in pro ball, they never hit the quarterback in practice.

Head and neck injuries are what parents thinking about letting their children play tackle football should be thinking about, talking about, and demanding answers about, from any coach presenting himself as a worthy custodian for their child's introduction to tackle football.

It's impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.

We've now found CTE in former NFL players who played every position except kicker.

As a physician, I'm somewhat an advocate of patients. How come, before Mike Webster, no NFL player was told or knew that there was an intrinsic risk of brain damage from playing football?

Sometimes I wake up and I think, where did my memory go? But at the same time, I signed up for it. Football has been like that for a long time, for ages.