Quote/Unquote

Editors Note: This friend of ours hosts a pickup basketball game in the alley behind his house just about every Wednesday night up in St. Louis. He sends out a mass email to let everyone know if the game is on or not on, and includes some random quotes he picks up from here and there. Here are some of them from the last couple weeks:

"It's really night and day [from when I played]. It's that stark. Like look at these locker rooms. We didn't have this. Our locker room was like a dungeon. And the players had beer and stuff in the lockers. Guys were smoking cigarettes in the locker rooms, at halftime. When me and Darryl Dawkins were rookies, we were in Indiana playing the Pacers, and they were kicking our ass by 30 points. So everybody walks into the locker room at halftime and one guy opens up a Schlitz and another guy lights up a cigarette. I said, "What the . . . ?"
---- World B. Free, Philadelphia Daily News, July 11, 2007

"It is far easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
---------- Frederick Douglass

"It is true that the Japanese armies were well armed and well led, but it is also true that the Chinese armies were so demoralized by the use of opium as to be incapable of offering a resistance to any army whatever."
------ Prince Galitzin, speaking in Edinbrugh, 1895, during the China-Japan War

"Despite all the artifice, despite the millions he has made, he is one of the most sincere footballers of his generation. Forget the togas and the tattoos, the hype and the hairdos, David Beckham is remarkably unchanged from the 17-year-old who made his debut for Manchester United. Just listen to him talk with the same squeaky, untrained enthusiasm as ever.....Last week, the great actress Helen Mirren was asked by The Stage which footballer she preferred, Beckham or Thierry Henry. "For sex," she said, "Thierry Henry, but for companionship David Beckham, because he is such a lovely, sweet man." Mirren knows a fair bit about men, and she has got him spot-on. We'll miss you, Becks. And you know what? I think you'll miss us, too."
--- Simon Hattenstone, in the Manchester Guardian, June 19 on Beckham's last game at Real Madrid

"We continue to struggle from big problem to big problem with Band-Aids and the bleeding continues and nobody is really ready to stand up and make the tough decisions. And I can tell you from personal experience it's not fun when somebody boos you, it's not fun when people vilify you, it's not fun when you read in the paper that nobody likes you. But if you do what you think is right, in the end I'm a believer that the public is a lot smarter than people give them credit for and they come around."
---- Mayor Michael Bloomberg of NYC after he decided to sever his ties to the Republican Party


"you can analyze the situation
to me it's all just mental masturbation,
there's only one way to rock..."
---- Sammy Hagar