Quotes from Jimmy Breslin

Life never was long enough to provide time for enemies. Nor is it long enough for people who bore me, or for me to stand around boring and antagonizing others, or for all of us, the others and me, to get into these half-friendly, half-sour fender-bumpings of egos and personalities and ideas, a process which turns a day into a contest when it really should be a series of hours serving your pleasure.

Pointing to the mutual envy of businessmen and politicians who are often out of their field in each other's area,, the author quotes the wisdom, A wise shoemaker sticks to his trade and maintains a mouthful of nails.

As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public's back is turned — and by people who want money but don't want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a nail into a board — nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.

I'm on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.

Shoelaces are the first way society ties up the individual.

woman came to the checkout counter. She took a small order out of the shopping cart and placed it on the conveyor. There was bread, chopped meat, dishwashing liquid, a

For consistency, Philadelphia baseball, among other things in the town, always has been the worst.

In his time, Hornsby was an unbelievable hitter who three times finished with an average of over .400, reaching .424 in 1924, a record still standing. This background has not made him exactly tolerant of the ability of baseball players. To illustrate, we reprint herewith the most glowing report on an individual which Hornsby handed in all season: LOOKS LIKE A MAJOR-LEAGUE PLAYER The name at the top of the sheet said the report was about Mickey Mantle.

LONG ISLAND, WHICH IS considered part of New York and the new home of the Mets, is the perfect place for them. Nothing particularly good has happened on Long Island for over fifty years, so nobody is going to get unduly concerned if the Mets take more than a little while to pull themselves together.

I figured I would be able to rely on big-name historians whom I have yet to read and that this would be immensely pleasurable. And then I read the books. History writers should be put not in the jail but under it.

Prejudice," Rickey told the table. "It reflects an attitude of a great many people in this country who don't introspect themselves very closely about their own prejudices. . . . You can't meet it with words. You can't take prejudice straight on. It must be done by proximity. Proximity! The player alongside you. No matter what the skin color or language. Win the game. Win all. Get the championship and the check that goes with it.

The Dodgers won it, 9-8, when Robinson hit a home run in the fourteenth inning. In the eleventh, he had knocked himself unconscious in a dive for a low line drive hit by Del Ennis. If he had not made the catch, the game would have been over. It was one of the matchless individual performances baseball has seen.

They lost an awful lot of games by one run, which is the mark of a bad team. They also lost innumerable games by fourteen runs or so. This is the mark of a terrible team.

I've been a Mets fan all my life." Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life.

It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

The financial people, who lead such dreary lives, believe what they read and see on television.

Politics, where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.