Bill Veeck Quotes

#1. When the Supreme Court says baseball isn't run like a business, everybody jumps up and down with joy. When I say the same thing, everybody throws pointy objects at me.

Bill Veeck

#2. How can you be a sage if you're pretty? You can't get your wizard papers without wrinkles.

Bill Veeck

#3. Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too?

Bill Veeck

#4. People identify with the swashbuckling individuals, not polite little men who field their position well. Sir Galahad had a big following - but I'll bet Lancelot had more.

Bill Veeck

#5. I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.

Bill Veeck

#6. Hating the Yankees isn't part of my act. It is one of those exquisite times when life and art are in perfect conjunction.

Bill Veeck

#7. Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere.

Bill Veeck

#8. I don't want the natural athlete
I want a guy who'll go after the hard ones.

Bill Veeck

#9. This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There's time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.

Bill Veeck

#10. Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn't changed

Bill Veeck

#11. Baseball is the only game left for people. To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width.

Bill Veeck

#12. The Falstaff people, romantics all, went for it. They were so anxious to find out what I was going to do that they could hardly bear to wait out the two weeks. I was rather anxious to find out what I was going to do, too.

Bill Veeck

#13. I'm for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done.

Bill Veeck

#14. I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.

Bill Veeck

#15. If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.

Bill Veeck

#16. Suffering is overrated. It doesn't teach you anything.

Bill Veeck

#17. I try not to kid myself. You know, I don't mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous.

Bill Veeck

#18. After a month or so in St. Louis, we were looking around desperately for a way to draw a few people into the ball park, it being perfectly clear by that time that the ball club wasn't going to do it unaided.

Bill Veeck

#19. Baseball is a boy's game that makes grown men cry.

Bill Veeck

#20. If you can't outsmart people, outwork them.

Bill Veeck

#21. An island of surety in a changing world.

Bill Veeck

#22. Suffering is overated.

Bill Veeck

#23. Three strikes, you're out. I don't care if you hire Edward Bennett Williams to defend you; three strikes, you're still out. Baseball is an island of stability in an unstable world.

Bill Veeck

#24. The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.

Bill Veeck

#25. Next to the confrontation between two highly honed batteries of lawyers, jungle warfare is a stately minuet.

Bill Veeck

#26. Though it is a team game by definition, it is actually a series of loosely connected individual efforts.

Bill Veeck

#27. I believe in God, but I'm not too clear on the other details.

Bill Veeck

#28. When there is no room for individualism in ballparks, then there will be no room for individualism in life.

Bill Veeck

#29. I was in the game for love. After all, where else can an old-timer with one leg, who can't hear or see, live like a king while doing the only thing I wanted to do?

Bill Veeck

#30. It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball's wounds are self-inflicted.

Bill Veeck

#31. I don't mind the high price of stardom. I just don't like the high price of mediocrity.

Bill Veeck

#32. Tradition is the albatross around the neck of progress.

Bill Veeck

#33. What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

Bill Veeck

#34. If U.S. Grant had been leading a team of baseball players, they'd have second guessed him all the way to the doorknob of the Appomattox Courthouse.

Bill Veeck

#35. Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

Bill Veeck

#36. The season starts too early and finishes too late and there are too many games in between.

Bill Veeck

#37. I do not think that winning is the most important thing. I think winning is the only thing.

Bill Veeck

#38. There are only two seasons - winter and Baseball.

Bill Veeck