On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch -- engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.

Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

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

All play aspires to the condition of paradise...through play in all its forms...we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden...always as removed, as an enclosed green place...Paradise is an ancient dream...It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

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