Top 40 Bill James Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.”

— Bill James

2. “If you can’t learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.”

— Bill James

3. “I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!”

— Bill James

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4. “Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.”

— Bill James

5. “A chart of numbers that would put an actuary to sleep can be made to dance if you put it on one side of a card and Bombo Rivera’s picture on the other.”

— Bill James

6. “I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.”

— Bill James

7. “Any of us are capable of doing things we’re not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.”

— Bill James

8. “I would never encourage my children to be athletes – first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.”

— Bill James

9. “Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason – because some people like them. It’s the same with baseball statistics.”

— Bill James

10. “There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.”

— Bill James

11. “Any of us are capable of doing things we’re not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses. Anyone can become a drug addict if you let yourself do it and, once you become a drug addict, you’ll do whatever you have to to get the drugs. Absolutely, anybody can do it.”

— Bill James

12. “Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.”

— Bill James

13. “Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.”

— Bill James

14. “Television is full of fictional and real violence that’s turned into entertainment. It’s an interesting phenomena and I tried to put it in perspective and tried to think through a few of the real questions that this sometimes unseemly business raises.”

— Bill James

15. “It’s extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.”

— Bill James

16. “You’re just too poor to get rich.”

— Bill James

17. “It is a very long and very difficult road from a fact to a conclusion. But it is a million times longer from a theory to a fact.”

— Bill James

18. “Visualizing the movement finally got me over the top after months of practice.”

— Bill James

19. “It’s easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.”

— Bill James

20. “When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you – period.”

— Bill James

21. “Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.”

— Bill James

22. “I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”

— Bill James

23. “Do people really believe there’s something different about the eyes of murderers?”

— Bill James

24. “Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.”

— Bill James

25. “You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don’t even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?”

— Bill James

26. “What happens in many of these cases is that, in the absence of evidence, the crime is pinned on a person of low social standing who is known to be in the vicinity of the crime. We have seen this repeatedly.”

— Bill James

27. “The search for understanding, wherever it roams, is a search for better simplifications. Simplifications which explain more and distort less... All human understanding is based on simplifications of more complex realities.”

— Bill James

28. “Television is full of fictional and real violence that’s turned into entertainment.”

— Bill James

29. “Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.”

— Bill James

30. “I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers.”

— Bill James

31. “There comes a moment during a job interview when you’re still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.”

— Bill James

32. “Even if Mays is given every conceivable break on every unknown – defense, base running, clutch hitting – his performance still would not match Mantle’s.”

— Bill James

33. “When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.”

— Bill James

34. “We don’t genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.”

— Bill James

35. “The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It’s how we expose police misconduct.”

— Bill James

36. “I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.”

— Bill James

37. “In a crime story, the details become tremendously important – where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.”

— Bill James

38. “Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard.”

— Bill James

39. “Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.”

— Bill James

40. “I do have a family, and obviously I spend as much time as I can with them. Though even when I’m with my family, my mind tends to drift toward baseball.”

— Bill James

41. “The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game – the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level – calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.”

— Bill James

42. “All societies have these cases. There are many, many crime cases that remain famous from the times of the Romans. The Bible is full of crime stories. You can almost flip to a page. Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers is a crime story. The Bible is full of crime stories.”

— Bill James

43. “The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.”

— Bill James

44. “Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws. There’s a great many intersections between this unseemly tabloid phenomena and serious social issues and we never get to that intersection because serious people don’t like to talk about that unattractive stuff.”

— Bill James

45. “He was called “Pancho” because people at that time didn’t have enough sense to be offended by stuff like that.”

— Bill James

46. “Crime stories show us the part of people’s lives they try to keep hidden.”

— Bill James

47. “You can’t ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.”

— Bill James