A decade after an average athlete graduates, everyone will have forgotten when and where he played. But every time he speaks, everyone will know whether he was educated.
Theodore HesburghMy basic principle is that you don't make decisions because they are cheap; you make them because they're right.
Theodore HesburghIt didn't matter that there were actually two lakes there, ... It didn't matter that he had only $300 in his pocket. He had the gall, or the zeal, to call it not a school, or a college, but a university.
Theodore HesburghThere is no academic virtue in playing mediocre football and no academic vice in winning a game that by all odds one should lose...There has indeed been a surrender at Notre Dame, but it is a surrender to excellence on all fronts, and in this we hope to rise above ourselves with the help of God.
Theodore HesburghI can think of no better way of redeeming this tragic world today than love and laughter. Too many of the young have forgotten how to laugh, and too many of the elders have forgotten how to love. Would not our lives be lightened if only we could all learn to laugh more easily at ourselves and to love one another?
Theodore HesburghThe melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War ii for no really good reason by our most liberal president. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slave like inequalities.
Theodore Hesburgh