“Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

“Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings.”

“For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.”

“When I meet a European, the first thing I say is, “I’d much rather watch football than football.” But I’m just teasing them, and they know I’d really rather watch football than football.”

“Football is violence and cold weather and college rye. ”

“One of the greatest paradoxes of the Black Power movement was that it talked unceasingly about not imitating the values of white society, but in advocating violence it was imitating the worst, the most brutal, and the most uncivilized value of American life. American Negroes had not been mass murderers. They had not murdered children in Sunday school, nor had they hung white men on trees bearing strange fruit. They had not been hooded perpetrators of violence, lynching human beings at will and drowning them at whim.”