Kevin Baker > Quotes

“All great world movements begin with a little knot of people who, in their individual lives, and in their relations to each other, realize the ideal that is to be...To live truth is better than to utter it. Isaiah would have prophesied in vain, had he not gathered round him a little band of disciples who lived according to his ideal...Again, what would the teachings of Jesus have amounted to had he not collected a body of disciples who made it their life-aim to put his teachings into practice? You will perhaps think I am laying out a mighty task far above your powers and aspirations. It is not so. Every great change in individual and social conditions begins small, among simple, earnest people, face to face with the facts of life. Ask yourselves seriously, 'Why should not the coming change begin with us?”
― Kevin Baker, Dreamland

“I understand that a curve ball is thrown with a deliberate purpose to deceive. Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.”
― Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City

“In 1934, the Chrysler/DeSoto Airflows were a revolution in design, sleeker, lower, and closer to the ground than anything then on the road, with a full steel body. They nearly wrecked the company, thanks in part to a number of glitches that had escaped notice, such as engines occasionally breaking loose from their mountings when the car reached eighty miles an hour.”
― Kevin Baker, America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World

“start”
― Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City

“The following year, Octavius Catto, just thirty-two, was murdered during a contentious Philadelphia election, shot dead on the street for trying to vote by one Frank Kelly, an Irish tough from the city’s Democratic political machine. Kelly would be acquitted. Catto would be honored with a statue in front of Philadelphia’s city hall—146 years later.”
― Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City

“Impressed deep in the psyche of America, the most literate society ever founded, was the idea that you could improve yourself—morally, philosophically, financially—through the written word.”
― Kevin Baker, America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World

“More daunting is the natural technology of the brain itself. True North can simulate 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses. The human brain has some 100 million neurons and maybe up to 1 quadrillion synapses—all of which it runs at just 1/40,000 of the power it takes to keep a personal computer humming.”
― Kevin Baker, America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World

“The game of baseball offered an entertainment that was not as dramatic as a fire, but one that moved with the pace of the city, the nation, the time. Whitman called it "America's game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws; it is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”
― Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City

“Meet me tonight in Dreamland Where love’s sweet roses bloom Come with the lovelight gleaming In your dear eyes of blue Meet me in Dreamland Sweet dreamy Dreamland There let my dreams come true They”
― Kevin Baker, Dreamland

“I believe that baseball is a homeopathic cure for lunacy,” a Dr. S. B. Talcott, superintendent of New York’s State Lunatic Asylum, told the press. “It is a kind of craze in itself, and it gives the lunatics a new kind of crazing to relieve them of the malady which afflicts their minds.”
― Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City

“If they but knew it, all men, some time or other, cherish the same feelings toward the abyss with me.”
― Kevin Baker, Dreamland