"The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct."
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Quote collection
Bill James quotes (page 1 of 3)
50 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break."
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"There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve."
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"I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were."
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"Even if Mays is given every conceivable break on every unknown - defense, base running, clutch hitting - his performance still would not match Mantle's."
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"Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics."
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"All societies have these cases. There are many, many crime cases that remain famous from the times of the Romans. The Bible is full of crime stories. You can almost flip to a page. Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers is a crime story. The Bible is full of crime stories."
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"Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing."
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"I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers."
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"Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment. It's an interesting phenomena and I tried to put it in perspective and tried to think through a few of the real questions that this sometimes unseemly business raises."
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"Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws. There's a great many intersections between this unseemly tabloid phenomena and serious social issues and we never get to that intersection because serious people don't like to talk about that unattractive stuff."
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"The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed."
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"I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say."
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"Visualizing the movement finally got me over the top after months of practice."
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"I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!"
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"Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard."
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"Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened."
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"It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not."
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"I like to feel that I understand little things about sports."
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"It is a very long and very difficult road from a fact to a conclusion. But it is a million times longer from a theory to a fact."
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