I never knew anyone yet who got up at six who did anything more useful between that time and breakfast than banging a tennis ball ...up against the side of the house, waiting for the more civilized members of the party to get up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In baseball there are generalists, who keep their eye on the ball and see the big picture; football is full of special-duty charac...ters who are very limited in terms of their range but have depth. Baseball represents America before the frontier ended, when there was plenty of space and plenty of time, and philosophic anarchists roamed around on verdant fields "doing their thing" with a free and reckless abandon. The game is relaxing and not particularly taxing on the players, who play many times each week. Football is tremendously difficult on the players and is so tiring that sixty minutes of clock time--which amounts to several hours of real time--exhausts them. Baseball developed when we thought nature was a limitless reservoir and we would always live in abundance. Football reflects a different world view; everything has to be fought for, resources are precious, hostile people (guards, monster men) are everywhere and in such a world you have to grab what you can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Children] need time to stare at a wall, daydream over a picture book, make mud pies, kick a ball around, whistle a tune or play t...he kazoo--to do the things today's adults had time to do when they were growing up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a... game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant way of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant abstract image of industrial society living by split-second timing, has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life. In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance. It agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in the electric age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now look, Winocki. There are two other men on this ship who washed up as pilots. But Martin's a bombardier and Hauser went in for ...navigation. And they're both good. You're a good gunner or you wouldn't have the rating you've got. We need you just like we need the whole gang. It takes all of us to make this ship function. Now get this into your head. We all belong to this airplane. Every man has got to rely on every other man to do the right thing at the right time. You played football, Winocki. You know how one man can gum up the works. You gotta play ball with us and play the game, or I'm gonna have to get rid of you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any balance we achieve between adult and parental identities, between children's and our own needs, works only for a time--because..., as one father says, "It's a new ball game just about every week." So we are always in the process of learning to be parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the hobbledehoy, though he blushes when women address him, and is uneasy even when he is near them, though he is not master of... his limbs in a ball-room, and is hardly master of his tongue at any time, is the most eloquent of beings, and especially eloquent among beautiful women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you ...can fool all of the people all of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair--a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its pa...rts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »