Sports

Quotes about Sport.

Sourced

• Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.
  • Nelson Mandela, Laureus World Sports Awards,(2000) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9awPf5SJ1E http://db.nelsonmandela.org/speeches/pub_view.asp?pg=item&ItemID=NMS1148&txtstr=Laureus http://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/gallery/photo_24.shtml

• He's long ago given up hope of finding a country anywhere in the world where it was safe to tell total strangers that he had no interest in sports whatsoever.
  • Greg Egan, Zendegi (2010), Ch. 3.

• By sports like these are all their cares beguil'd,
  The sports of children satisfy the child.
  • Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller (1764), line 153.

• It is a poor sport that is not worth the candle.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).

• Nec luisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum.
  • The shame is not in having sported, but in not having broken off the sport.
  • Horace, Epistles (c. 20 BC and 14 BC), I. 14. 36.

• Many more people in the world are concerned with sports than with human rights.
  • Huntington, Samuel Phillips (1997). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. Simon & Schuster. pp. 197. ISBN 9780684844411. Retrieved on 2011-03-25. 

• When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport, than she makes me?
  • Michel de Montaigne, Apology far Raimond de Sebonde; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 746.

• Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
  • George Orwell, 1945-12-14. "The Sporting Spirit", Tribune.

• If all the year were playing holidays;
  to sport would be as tedious as work;
  • William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (1597), Act I, Scene II

• For neither if there were a good boxer among the people, nor if there were a pentathlete or wrestling, nor again if there were someome swift of foot - which is most honoured of all men's deed of strength - would for this reason a city be better governed.
  • Xenophanes
  • Lesher, James H. (1992). Xenophanes of Colophon: fragments : a text and translation with a commentary. University of Toronto Press Incorporated. pp. 15. ISBN 0-8020-8508-3. Retrieved on 2011-03-25. 

• Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), pp. 382-383.

• Everyone knows the difference between a fisherman, a sailor, a swimmer, a cyclist, and people who fish, sail, swim and cycle for sport. The last are technicians; as Jünger says, they “tend to carry to perfection the mechanical side of their activity.” This mechanization of actions is accompanied by the mechanization of sporting goods—stop watches, starting machines, and so on. In this exact measurement of time, in the precision training of muscular actions, and in the principle of the “record,” we find repeated in sport one of the essential elements of industrial life.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. 383.

• The human being becomes a kind of machine, and his machine-controlled activity becomes a technique. This technical civilization profits by this mechanization: the individual, by means of the discipline imposed on him by sport, not only plays and finds relaxation from the various compulsions to which he is subjected, but without knowing it trains himself for new compulsions. A familiar process is repeated: real play and enjoyment, contact with air and water, improvisation and spontaneity all disappear. These values are lost to the pursuit of efficiency, records, and strict rules. Training in sports makes of the individual an efficient piece of apparatus which is henceforth unacquainted with anything but the harsh joys of exploiting his body and winning.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. 383.

• Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives—in short, all the technical laws and customs—which he encounters in office or factory.
  • Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964), p. 384.