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 liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

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

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.

No one man is superior to the game.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

The Bible is worth all the other books which have ever been printed.

I like to change. A new lamp, a piece of art, can transform a room.

How do I stop eleven million people from buying the grape?

I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes.

Kiss is not a charity. Never, ever mix commerce and charity.

A teacher's failure to create an intellectually reflective, engagement for learning is not simply malpractice but it is immoral particularly for students who cannot withdraw.

Morally considered, laughter is next to the Ten Commandments.

Phones and soundtracks and Muzak and fountains replace genuine and unpredictable human contact with a seamless soundtrack from a bad movie and a cliche that makes us believe we must all be happy.

Nothing will ever please me, no matter how excellent or beneficial, if I must retain the knowledge of it to myself. . . . . . No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it.