Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

The figure of the enthusiast who has just discovered jogging or a new way to fix tofu can be said to stand or, more accurately, to tremble on the threshold of conversion, as the representative American

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.