It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theatres, etc., that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness and jazz bands. – George Santayana, letter to Van Wyck Brooks, 1927

The Super Bowl is a kind of corporate Woodstock. – Michael Ruby, Inside Sports, 1981

I quickly learned what many Sunday widows already realized — that football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbal, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time. – Arnold J. Mandell, “A Psychiatric Study of Professional Football,” 1974 [An inte

The greatest gap in sports is between the winner and the loser of the Super Bowl. The winner has confetti, parades, rings, the whole thing. The loser puts his head down and goes to his house. – John Madden, NBC Sports press conference, Super Bowl XLIII (2009)