When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately - unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.
- Dick Butkus
If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?
- Vince Lombardi
Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.
- Dave Barry
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
- Erma Bombeck
If you're mad at your kid, you can either raise him to be a nose tackle or send him out to play on the freeway. It's about the same.
- Bob Golic
At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.
- George Plimpton
You need to play with supreme confidence, or else you'll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit.
- Joe Paterno
Football doesn't build character, it reveals character!
- Marv Levy
Football is like life - it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.
- Vince Lombardi
If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
- Erma Bombeck
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog!
- Archie Griffin
Football is all very well a good game for rough girls, but not for delicate boys.
- Oscar Wilde
Academe, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n. (from academe) A modern school where football is taught.
- Ambrose Bierce
Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen, soccer is a gentlemen's game played by beasts and US football is a beastly game played by beasts.
- Henry Blaha
God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.
- Heywood Broun
If any thing goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That's all it takes to get people to win football games for you.
- Paul Bear Bryant
If you can believe it, the mind can achieve it.
- Ronnie Lott
We (San Francisco) have football weather during baseball season, and baseball weather during football season.
- Herb Caen
All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
- Albert Camus
Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.
- Robert Downey, Jr.
Football, wherein is nothing but beastly fury, and extreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurt, and consequently rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded.
- Thomas Elyot (1531)
Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.
- Frank Gifford
Gentlemen, it is better to have died a small boy than to fumble this football.
- John Heisman
If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.
- Irwin Shaw
It was an ideal day for football - too cold for the spectators and too cold for the players.
- Red Smith
Most football players are temperamental. That's 90 percent temper and 10 percent mental.
- Doug Plank
You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.
- Dan Birdwell
The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.
- Phyllis Diller
Men are clinging to football on a level we aren't even aware of. For centuries, we ruled everything, and now, in the last ten minutes, there are all these incursions by women. It's our Alamo.
- Tony Kornheiser
Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.
- Oscar Wilde
Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it.
- Heywood Hale Brown
You really don't want a president who is a football fan. Football combines the worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
- George Will
Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.
- Mary McGrory
American football makes rugby look like a Tupperware party.
- Sue Lawley
Football is easy if you're crazy as hell.
- Bo Jackson
He's fair. He treats us all the same - like dogs.
- Henry Jordan
We are inclined to think that if we watch a football game or a baseball game, we have taken part in it.
- John F. Kennedy
Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.
- Merle Kessler
Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football.
- Fran Lebowitz
Football isn't a contact sport; it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.
- Vince Lombardi
To play this game (Football) you must have fire in you, and there is nothing that strokes fire like hate.
- Vince Lombardi
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
- Eugene McCarthy
College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.
- Elbert Hubbard
What about football? Is it a sport or a concussion?
- Jim MurrayLos Angeles Times.
The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break.
- John Madden
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.
- Vince Lombardi
The word 'genius' isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
- Joe Theisman
Leaders aren't born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.
- Vincent Lombardi
If you train hard, you'll not only be hard, you'll be hard to beat.
- Herschel Walker
You have to perform at a consistently higher level than others. That's the mark of a true professional.
- Joe Paterno
If you can believe it, the mind can achieve it.
- Ronnie Lott
Watching football is like watching pornography. There's plenty of action, and I can't take my eyes off it, but when it's over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it.
- Luke Salisbury
There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters. And, quite frankly, they're both a pain in the ass.
- Dan Devine
When it's third and ten, you can take the milk drinkers and I'll take the whiskey drinkers every time.
- Max McGee
That field goal attempt was so far to the left it nearly decapitated Lyndon LaRouche.
- Dennis Miller
Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you're in control, they're in control.
- Tom Landry
Football Is an honest game. It's true to life. It's a game about sharing. Football is a team game. So is life.
- Joe Namath
Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.
- Knute Rockne
In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.
- Theodore Roosevelt
When it comes to football, God is prejudiced - toward big, fast kids.
- Chuck Mills
