Top 35 A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

2. “Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they’re here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

3. “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

4. “Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

5. “A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

6. “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

7. “Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

8. “You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

9. “We have an obligation to spread amateur baseball both at home and abroad. Building up the game at all levels – Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, the colleges – is in our own self-interest. That’s where the pool of talent is – and also of fans.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

10. “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

11. “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

12. “No one man is superior to the game.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

13. “On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

14. “To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

15. “For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

16. “All I ever wanted to be president of was the American League.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

17. “Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

18. “Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

19. “People will say I’m an idealist. I hope so.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

20. “There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

21. “Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America’s most privileged version of the level field.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

22. “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

23. “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

24. “My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

25. “There are a lot of people who know me who can’t understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

29. “Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

30. “The professionals must set a good example.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

31. “The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

32. “There’s nothing bad that accrues from baseball.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “It is the story we have hinted at already, the story of going home after having left home, the story of how difficult it is to find the origins one so deeply needs to find. It is the literary mode called Romance.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti