Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive. A. Bartlett Giamatti More Quotes by A. Bartlett Giamatti More Quotes From A. Bartlett Giamatti The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values. A. Bartlett Giamatti made mind culture The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know. A. Bartlett Giamatti games sports believe This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did. A. Bartlett Giamatti first-time jobs firsts It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table. A. Bartlett Giamatti eating students tables A convention is a social pattern we have chosen to prefer over whatever the raw world simply proffers. It is a sign of the operation of the mind, drawing the assent of a sufficient number of other minds so that the agreement will be widely operative. A convention is not a custom; a custom is a habit in which a sufficient number acquiesce. A custom can appear as a convention, but it is really a lesser act, the result of passive acceptance rather than of the imposition of design. It is the difference between learning to live by the annual flooding of the river or by a calendar. A. Bartlett Giamatti agreement acceptance rivers A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer. A. Bartlett Giamatti social successful responsibility The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust. A. Bartlett Giamatti player baseball america My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs. A. Bartlett Giamatti goal people thinking Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society. A. Bartlett Giamatti majors sports people I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures. A. Bartlett Giamatti athlete experts world All I ever wanted to be president of was the American League. A. Bartlett Giamatti president league wanted On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way. A. Bartlett Giamatti common-decency race baseball There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball. A. Bartlett Giamatti baseball As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre - except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places. A. Bartlett Giamatti olympus pyramids winter Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. A. Bartlett Giamatti purity winning joy I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism. A. Bartlett Giamatti racism The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is a sad end if a sorry episode. One of the game's greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. There is absolutely no deal for reinstatement. A. Bartlett Giamatti player baseball sorry I think that the young people today feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to their brothers and sisters because of the sacrifices that most families make to send their children to college. A. Bartlett Giamatti brother responsibility children If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction. A. Bartlett Giamatti imagination cities expression Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace. A. Bartlett Giamatti grace special thinking
