David Winner Quotes

“The ultimate space-measurer in Dutch football is of course, Johan Cruyff. He was only seventeen when he first played at Ajax, yet even then he delivered running commentaries on the use of space to the rest of the team, telling them where to run, where not to run. Players did what the tiny, skinny teenager told them to do because he was right. Cruyff didn't talk about abstract space but about specific, detailed spatial relations on the field. Indeed, the most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing. 'No, not there, back a little... forward two metres... four metres more to the left.' He seemed like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra. It was as if Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realize an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered.”

“If I wanted you to understand, I would explain it better.”

“Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.”

“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.”

“History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.”

“Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.”

“An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.”

“In today's society conformity is more of a necessity than an option.”

“To win you have to score one more goal than your opponent.”

“Everyone dies, but does everyone really live?”