Quotes About Amateurism

If the NFL can keep getting away with forcing players to wait three years out of high school before they're drafted - three! - the NCAA should be made to do away with its rules against paying players beyond room, board and tuition. I'm not talking about some token, $2,000-a-year 'spending money' stipend for every player.

I think one of the most immoral things is college football and basketball, where everybody is making money except the players.

It can often seem that those in power don't want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they'd prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

The two oldest professions in the world—ruined by amateurs.

That was real baseball. We weren't playing for money. They gave us Mickey Mouse watches that ran backwards.

Amateurism is the strongest form of discrimination in sports. Because it discriminates against the underprivileged, it discriminates against the poor. If we want sports to go back to the wealthy, let's make it amateur again.

I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.

Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.

Above all else I am a dilettante in life.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

If you offer athletes stipends, then you're into pay-for-play, and that's the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model for a sports-entertainment industry. It wasn't in tennis. It wasn't in the Olympics. And it's not in big-time college sports.

Amateurism has its place in government, in journalism and also on the tennis court, but lack of expertise means politicians routinely promise far more than they achieve.

Sochi started with the same problem as every Winter Olympics. Forget the crass commercialism, the fake amateurism, NBC's refusal to televise important events live to all its viewers. As an event, the Winter Games fail on the most basic level. They're lousy to watch.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.

For far too long the House of Commons has been run as little more than a private club by and for gentleman amateurs.

Amateur bureaucrats are often even worse than professional bureaucrats.

Many artists are addicts, and vice versa. Many are artists in one breath and addicts in another. What's the difference? The addict is the amateur; the artist is the professional.

amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.

what ails you and me has nothing to do with being sick…What ails us is that we are living our lives as amateurs. The solution…is that we turn pro.

Used to the technical standards of international ballet, she had not allowed in her mind for the inevitable amateurism of dancing in this milieu. In everything she had seen the students do so far they had been the best of their line in the business; professionals. But it was obviously not possible to give to other subjects the time and energy that they did and still reach a high standard as dancers. Dancing was a whole-time job.

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs

I think that's my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I've read about it, I've written about it, I've done it all my life but at heart, I'm just a passionate amateur gardener.

The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it.