Football (soccer) and American football quotes # 1

Les citations suivantes ont été réunies par Jonathan Goldberg, que je remercie.

Football doesn't build character, it reveals character!
Marv Levy

Football is like life -- it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.
Vince Lombardi

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
Erma Bombeck

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog!
Archie Griffin

The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war; for nationalism; identification with something bigger than the self.
Edward Abbey

Football is all very well a good game for rough girls, but not for delicate boys.
Oscar Wilde

Academe, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n. (from academe) A modern school where football is taught.
Ambrose Bierce

Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen, soccer is a gentlemen's game played by beasts and US football is a beastly game played by beasts.
Henry Blaha

God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.
Heywood Broun

If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That's all it takes to get people to win football games for you.
Paul Bear Bryant

When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately - unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.
Dick Butkus

If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?
Vince Lombardi

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.
Dave Barry

You need to play with supreme confidence, or else you'll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit.
Joe Paterno

Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.
Robert Downey, Jr.

Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid, we command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.
Edward II
Royal proclamation banning football from the streets of London, 1314.

Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.
Frank Gifford

Gentlemen, it is better to have died a small boy than to fumble this football.
John Heisman

Football is easy if you're crazy as hell.
Bo Jackson

He's a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
About Gerald Ford.

He's fair. He treats us all the same - like dogs.
Henry Jordan
On his football coach, Vince Lombardi, affectionately recalled on Lombardi's death.

We are inclined to think that if we watch a football game or a baseball game, we have taken part in it.
John F. Kennedy

I stared into the darkness of the bunkrooms thinking what to do. 'Ah, shucks, go into the American night, the Thomas Wolfe darkness, the hell with these bigshot gangster football coaches, go after being an American writer, tell the truth, don't be pushed around by them or anybody else or any of their goons . . . The Ivy League is just an excuse to get football players for nothing and get them to be American cornballs enough to make America sick for a thousand years.
Jack Kerouac

Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.
Merle Kessler

Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football.
Fran Lebowitz

Football isn't a contact sport; it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.
Vince Lombardi
Also attributed to Duffy Daugherty.

To play this game (football) you must have fire in you, and there is nothing that strokes fire like hate.
Vince Lombardi

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
Eugene McCarthy

College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.
Elbert Hubbard

Watching football is like watching pornography. There's plenty of action, and I can't take my eyes off it, but when it's over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it.
Luke Salisbury

College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.
Henry Louis Mencken

The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries.
Art Modell
Of the Cleveland Browns.

Football Is an honest game. It's true to life. It's a game about sharing. Football is a team game. So is life.
Joe Namath

Half this game is ninety percent mental.
Danny Ozark
Philadelphia Phillies manager.

Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.
Knute Rockne

In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.
Theodore Roosevelt

In the football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.
Jean Paul Sartre

Someone said, "Football's a matter of life and death" - but it's more important than that.
Bill Shankly

If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.
Irwin Shaw

It was an ideal day for football - too cold for the spectators and too cold for the players.
Red Smith

Most football players are temperamental. That's 90 percent temper and 10 percent mental.
Doug Plank

Let's face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.
Tim Green

You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.
Dan Birdwell

Football is mesmerizing, because it's a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do.
Oliver Stone

The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.
Phyllis Diller

I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.
Dave Barry

The rest of the world is sweeping past us. The oil and gas of the Texas future is the well-educated mind. But we are still worried about whether Midland can beat Odessa at football.
Mark White

Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.
Oscar Wilde

Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it.
Heywood Hale Brown

You really don't want a president who is a football fan. Football combines the worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.
Mary McGrory

American football makes rugby look like a Tupperware party.
Sue Lawley

So the Patriots won the Super Bowl? Yep, that'll change the course of western civilization forever.
Author Unknown

If ballet were easy, they'd call it football.
Author Unknown

One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured.
Author Unknown

Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?
Jim Bouton

(to be continued)