Quotes from Branch Rickey

A full mind is an empty bat.

Never surrender opportunity for security.

Branch Rickey made me a better man.

Don't worry about your individual numbers. Worry about the team. If the team is successful, each of you will be successful, too.

I cannot face my God much longer knowing that his black creatures are held separate and distinct from his white creatures in the game that has given me all that I can call my own.

We win if the world is convinced of two things, that you are a fine gentleman, and a great baseball player.

It is not the honor that you take with you, but the heritage you leave behind.

Leisure is the handmaiden of the devil.

I find fault with my children because I like them and I want them to go places - uprightness and strength and courage and civil respect and anything that affects the probabilities of failure on the part of those that are closest to me, that concerns me - I find fault.

Problems are the price you pay for progress.

Success is that place in the road where preparation meets opportunity.

Only in baseball can a team player be a pure individualist first and a team player second, within the rules and spirit of the game.

Cobb lived off the field as though he wished to live forever. He lived on the field as though it was his last day.

Thou shalt not steal. I mean defensively. On offense, indeed thou shall steal and thou must.

How to use your leisure time is the biggest problem of a ballplayer.

Thinking about the devil is worse than seeing the devil.

There never has been a man in the game who could put mind and muscle together quicker and with better judgment than Robinson.

Baseball is a game of inches.

Ethnic prejudice has no place in sports, and baseball must recognize that truth if it is to maintain stature as a national game.

Trade a player a year too early rather than a year too late.

Baseball people, and that includes myself, are slow to change and accept new ideas. I remember that it took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms.

Problems are the price you pay for progress.

A game of great charm in the adoption of mathematical measurements to the timing of human movements, the exactitudes and adjustments of physical ability to hazardous chance. The speed of the legs, the dexterity of the body, the grace of the swing, the elusiveness of the slide — these are the features that make Americans everywhere forget the last syllable of a man's last name or the pigmentation of his skin.

First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to zip up your fly; and then you forget to unzip your fly.