Top 35 Bill Veeck Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you can’t outsmart people, outwork them.”

— Bill Veeck

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2. “There are only two seasons – winter and Baseball.”

— Bill Veeck

3. “Tradition is the albatross around the neck of progress.”

— Bill Veeck

4. “I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity.”

— Bill Veeck

5. “Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”

— Bill Veeck

6. “Suffering is overrated. It doesn’t teach you anything.”

— Bill Veeck

7. “Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn’t changed.”

— Bill Veeck

Featured in: Baseball Quotes

8. “If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.”

— Bill Veeck

9. “Three strikes, you’re out. I don’t care if you hire Edward Bennett Williams to defend you; three strikes, you’re still out. Baseball is an island of stability in an unstable world.”

— Bill Veeck

10. “I don’t want the natural athlete – I want a guy who’ll go after the hard ones.”

— Bill Veeck

11. “I do not think that winning is the most important thing. I think winning is the only thing.”

— Bill Veeck

12. “This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There’s time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.”

— Bill Veeck

13. “I’m for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can’t be done.”

— Bill Veeck

14. “I try not to kid myself. You know, I don’t mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous.”

— Bill Veeck

15. “How can you be a sage if you’re pretty? You can’t get your wizard papers without wrinkles.”

— Bill Veeck

16. “I don’t mind the high price of stardom. I just don’t like the high price of mediocrity.”

— Bill Veeck

17. “The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.”

— Bill Veeck

18. “Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too?”

— Bill Veeck

19. “Baseball is a boy’s game that makes grown men cry.”

— Bill Veeck

20. “The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.”

— Bill Veeck

21. “Hating the Yankees isn’t part of my act. It is one of those exquisite times when life and art are in perfect conjunction.”

— Bill Veeck

22. “Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere.”

— Bill Veeck

23. “Next to the confrontation between two highly honed batteries of lawyers, jungle warfare is a stately minuet.”

— Bill Veeck

24. “Baseball is the only game left for people. To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width.”

— Bill Veeck

25. “It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball’s wounds are self-inflicted.”

— Bill Veeck

26. “What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.”

— Bill Veeck

27. “An island of surety in a changing world.”

— Bill Veeck

28. “When there is no room for individualism in ballparks, then there will be no room for individualism in life.”

— Bill Veeck

29. “The Falstaff people, romantics all, went for it. They were so anxious to find out what I was going to do that they could hardly bear to wait out the two weeks. I was rather anxious to find out what I was going to do, too.”

— Bill Veeck

30. “I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.”

— Bill Veeck

31. “Though it is a team game by definition, it is actually a series of loosely connected individual efforts.”

— Bill Veeck

32. “The season starts too early and finishes too late and there are too many games in between.”

— Bill Veeck

33. “I believe in God, but I’m not too clear on the other details.”

— Bill Veeck

34. “People identify with the swashbuckling individuals, not polite little men who field their position well. Sir Galahad had a big following – but I’ll bet Lancelot had more.”

— Bill Veeck

35. “Suffering is overated.”

— Bill Veeck

36. “I was in the game for love. After all, where else can an old-timer with one leg, who can’t hear or see, live like a king while doing the only thing I wanted to do?”

— Bill Veeck

37. “When the Supreme Court says baseball isn’t run like a business, everybody jumps up and down with joy. When I say the same thing, everybody throws pointy objects at me.”

— Bill Veeck