"Most of all I was saddling that team with a psychological burden so that they would be muttering, Cobb is crazy. He'll run anytime and in any situation. It would help give them the jitters and they'd concentrate so much on me they were not paying any attention to the business at hand. My failures rarely were complete failures. They were more like future investments."

"I could never stand losing. Second place didn't interest me. I had a fire in my belly."

"Someone will hit .400 again. Somebody will get smart and swing naturally."

"A ball bat is a wondrous weapon."

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest."

"Baseball was one-hundred percent of my life."

"Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher."

"His (Walter Johnson's) fastball looked about the size of a watermelon seed and it hissed at you as it passed."

"I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch."

"I have observed that baseball is not unlike a war, and when you come right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.

I may have been fierce, but never low or underhanded."

"I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor."

"Just speed, raw speed, blinding speed, too much speed (Walter Johnson's fastball)."

"Speed is a great asset; but it's greater when it's combined with quickness - and there's a big difference."

"That boy (Mickey) Mantle is a good one.

"That god damned Dutchman (Honus Wagner) is the only man in the game I can't scare."

"The base paths belonged to me, the runner. The rules gave me the right. I always went into a bag full speed, feet first. I had sharp spikes on my shoes. If the baseman stood where he had no business to be and got hurt, that was his fault."

"The crowd makes the ballgame."

"The great American game should be an unrelenting war of nerves."

"The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it."

"The way those clubs shift against Ted Williams, I can't understand how he can be so stupid not to accept the challenge to him and hit to left field."

"To get along with me, don't increase my tension."

"When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch."

"When I came to Detroit I was just a mild-mannered Sunday-school boy."

"You (Stan Musial) can still run and you still can hit. Drink a little wine before dinner and you'll play for years."

"You've got to remember - I'm seventy-three." On explaining why he would only hit .300 against today's pitchers.

"The honorable and honest Cobb blood...never will be subjected. It bows to no wrong nor to any man...the Cobbs have their ideals and God help anyone who strives to bend a Cobb away from such."

"Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit." - Babe Ruth

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

"They can talk about Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby and Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio and Stan Musial and all the rest, but I'm sure not one of them could hold cards and spades to Williams in his sheer knowledge of hitting. He studied hitting the way a broker studies the stock market, and could spot at a glance mistakes that others couldn't see in a week." - Carl Yastrzemski

"I never saw anyone like Ty Cobb. No one even close to him. He was the greatest all time ballplayer. That guy was superhuman, amazing." - Casey Stengel

"Hornsby could run like anything but not like this kid. Cobb was the fastest I ever saw for being sensational on the bases." - Casey Stengel

"He had a son-of-a-bitch list. He would write down the names of people, including everybody from his ex-wives to Eleanor Roosevelt to Kenesaw Mountain Landis." - Charles Alexander

"Let him sleep if he will. If you get him riled up, he will annihilate us." - Connie Mack

An outfield composed of Cobb, Speaker and Ruth, even with Ruth, lacks the combined power of DiMaggio, Musial and Williams." - Connie Mack

"He threw more curves in money negotiations than a whole tribe of Arabs. He would hold out until hell froze over or until he got what he demanded." - Frank Navin

"I have heard of managers who encourage players not to slide hard for fear they will get hurt and be lost from the lineup for a time. That is why you occasionally see a player go into second base on a double-play ball and not even bother to slide. I wonder, could Ty Cobb sit though plays like that and hold his lunch?" - Frank Robinson

"Few names have left a firmer imprint upon the stages of the history of American times than that of Ty Cobb. For a quarter of a century his aggressive exploits on the diamond, while inviting opposition as well as acclaim, brought high drama. This great athlete seems to have understood from early in his professional career that the competition of baseball, just as in war, defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory." - General Douglas MacArthur

"The greatness of Ty Cobb was something that had to be seen, and to see him was to remember him forever." - George Sisler

"I recall when Cobb played a series with each leg a mass of raw flesh. He had a temperature of 103, and the doctors ordered him to bed for several days, but he got three hits, stole three bases, and won the game." - Grantland Rice

"Every time I hear of this guy again, I wonder how he was possible." - Joe DiMaggio

"When I get the record, all it will make me is the player with the most hits. I'm also the player with the most at bats and the most outs. I never said I was a greater player than Cobb." - Pete Rose

"When he's at bat you can hear him gritting his teeth." - Rebel Oaks

"He was still fighting the Civil War, and as far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees. But who knows, if he hadn't had that terrible persecution complex, he never would have been about the best ballplayer who ever lived." - Sam Crawford

"He didn't outhit and he didn't outrun them, he out thought them." - Sam Crawford

"The Babe was a great ballplayer, sure, but Cobb was even greater. Babe could knock your brains out, but Cobb would drive you crazy." - Tris Speaker