Using Stoic Philosophy Today

 

Some people obsessively monitor presidential election polls. Others ignore any political news like an overdue bill. And a few probably wish they could just press a button and fast-forward past this November.

Americans have devised all sorts of strategies to deal with the unrelenting stress of this year’s presidential race. The rematch between President Biden and former President Trump has been called “the most dreaded election in modern political history.” As the two rivals prepare to debate on Thursday, about six in 10 American adults say they are already worn out by campaign coverage.

But there’s another way to cope with anxiety about the future — by turning to the past. Mention the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, and it may conjure images of boring, bearded White men in togas who lived thousands of years ago. But sages like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius offer plenty of practical advice for today’s voters who are navigating the relentless grind of this year’s presidential election.

Stoic philosophy, which teaches that it is impossible to live a happy life without living virtuously, also talks a lot about confronting one’s worse fears. The definition of Stoicism varies, but bestselling author Ryan Holiday describes it as the a “tool in the pursuit of self-mastery, perseverance and wisdom.”

The first Stoic school was founded in Athens by a philosopher named Zeno of Citium around the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Zeno, who lost his entire fortune in a shipwreck, found consolation in philosophy. He later quipped, “My most profitable journey began on the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.”

We too can begin such a journey, Holiday says. He says that like us, the Stoics also knew something about dealing with loss, political instability and living in a time when many people felt politically powerless. He cites Aurelius, a Stoic follower who became one of Rome’s greatest emperors. He led Rome during a global pandemic that killed at least 10 million people and grappled constantly with war and murderous political divisions.

“Aurelius experienced this devastating global pandemic that ravaged society,” says Holiday, who just released “Right Thing, Right Now,” the third installment in his bestselling book series on Stoic virtues.  “But he would have also seen what it [the pandemic] did to people: the tribalism, the fear, the anger along with the flights of fancy. He saw everything that we just saw over the last couple of years.”

CNN talked to Holiday and Massimo Pigliucci, author of “How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.” Both authors, through books, videos and podcasts, are two of the most popular modern-day interpreters of Stoicism. They offered three pieces of Stoic advice for handling the anxiety of this year’s election.

Don’t let the future destroy the present.

It pays to look ahead in the world of politics. Pollsters predict trends. Pundits gauge the potential impact of political gaffes. Party leaders assess the implications of court decisions. Worry about the future is constant.

That type of worry, though, spreads like a contagion to voters. People obsess about what will happen to them if the wrong candidate is elected. Some fixate on nightmare scenarios about the country descending into civil war. This grinding anxiety echoes Shakespeare’s famous line from “Julius Caesar”: “A coward dies a thousand times, a hero dies but once.”

Stoics only die once, though, because they reject fixating on the future. Stoicism teaches people to separate what they can control from what they cannot. Their advice: don’t become engulfed by nightmare political scenarios that may or may not come to pass. “The Stoics say that he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary,” Holiday says. “The idea that you should wake up every day in miserable anticipation of a thing that may or may not happen is to punish yourself on top of whatever the pain that will come from that thing actually happening,” Holiday says.

Pigliucci says Stoics coped with the political turbulence of their day by focusing on what they could control: their emotions. He cites the Serenity Prayer, which is often recited at 12-step programs. The prayer is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, a towering Christian theologian from the 20th century, and asks God to “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

“Seems like excellent advice for the upcoming presidential elections,” Pigliucci says. “Have the courage to do your duty as a citizen; vote, maybe send money or volunteer for a campaign; then accept the outcome because it will be what it will be.”

Don’t be too cynical to get involved.

Maybe you’ve met this type of person. They don’t vote because they say it won’t make a difference.  You might hear them in a barbershop or perched on a barstool, griping. All politicians are corrupt. The Illuminati control everything. Pass me a beer.

Some people deal with the anxiety of the election by checking out of politics altogether. The ancient Athenians had a word for citizens that refused to exercise their right to vote. They called them “idiotai,” from which the word “idiot” is derived.

Many Stoic leaders would never be labeled as “idiotai.” They were passionately involved in politics and the pursuit of justice. That may surprise people. Stoics get a bad rap because of the way the way the word is defined: someone “indifferent to pain or pleasure,” not showing “passion or feeling.” But ancient Stoic leaders would have been at home jousting on Sunday morning political talk shows or marching in a Black Lives Matter protest.

Holiday says Aurelius wrote constantly about justice in his classic book, “Meditations.” “He talks about the common good more than 80 times in ‘Meditations,”  Holiday says. “He talks about it more than just about anything. He actually says the whole purpose of life is good character and acts for the common good.”

The stereotype of the dispassionate, uninvolved Stoic is “as wrong as it could possibly be,” Holiday says. “If you look at the actual lives of Stoics, these are people who got married, had families, ran for public office and fought for causes,” Holiday says. “There was a generation of Stoics that were such a perpetual thorn in the side of emperors that they were known as the Stoic Opposition. At one point, all of them are kicked out of Rome because they won’t go along to get along.”

Cynicism can be masked cowardice — some cynics are afraid of the risks that come with getting involved. But the Stoic leaders were known for their courage in standing up to political tyrants. Pigliucci tells a famous story about political courage that centers on  Helvidius Priscus, a Stoic philosopher.

When the Roman emperor Vespasian threatened Priscus, the Stoic philosopher, with execution for speaking out against political tyranny, Priscus responded by saying: “Well, when have I ever claimed to you that I’m immortal? You fulfill your role, and I’ll fulfill mine. It is yours to have me killed, and mine to die without a tremor; it is yours to send me into exile, and mine to depart without a qualm.”

Be kind, even to your political enemies.

It’s hard not to be cynical when it comes to US presidential politics. Candidates brazenly lie on the campaign trail. Partisan websites and social media platforms spread so much disinformation that’s hard to know what to believe. Politicians who once loudly opposed certain candidates now bend the knee to curry their favor.

It’s easy for our dislike for our political opponents to morph into hatred. But Holiday suggests we consider how Aurelius dealt with political treachery in his time.  Aurelius survived an attempted coup from his most trusted general. He had unlimited power and could have devised an array of sadistic measures to torment or kill his traitor.  But he refused to do so.

“In fact, he wept when he was deprived of the chance to grant clemency to his former enemy,” Holiday writes in an essay on Aurelius. “The best revenge, Marcus would write “is to not be like that.”

When family or friends insult you or stop talking to you because of a political disagreement, it’s easy to respond in kind. The Stoics, though, have two words of advice, Holiday says: Be kind. That may sound naïve when personal attacks have become the norm in modern-day politics and this year’s presidential race. But Epictetus said that “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master.”

“The Stoics said we should try to see every person we meet as an opportunity for kindness,” Holiday writes in his new book. Holiday says that when Aurelius was on his deathbed, he had one regret: He was still chastising himself over the times he had had lost his temper and been unkind to others.

Holiday says he’s had to apply that Stoic advice to his own personal life. He has risen in prominence in part because he’s sold a reported 6 million books on Stoicism. He’s also built a mini-empire around Stoicism that includes YouTube videos, an Instagram feed and a Stoic newsletter.

His elevated public profile has led to some personal challenges. He says he and his family have been constantly harassed because they have taken stands against book banning, in support of women’s rights, and for the removal of Confederate monuments. A friend betrayed him.

Holiday says a younger version of himself would have “wanted blood” for those who have tried to hurt him. Instead he considered the actions of Stoic leaders like Aurelius, drawing a direct link between the “dark energy” that the Stoic leaders faced in their time and what he sees in the 2024 presidential election cycle.

“There is this energy across all societies that is driven by hatred, fear, and that wants to protect what it has and prevent other people from getting their piece of it,” Holiday tells CNN. “And that energy was certainly there in Roman times. “

But solutions to that dark energy are there, too. Stoic leaders may seem like distant figures encased in marble, but we can learn from them, Holiday says. They wrestled with and ultimately defeated the same dark energy that drove the political tribalization of their day. So can we.

John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

Twenty-Five Seconds Per Life: The Story of an Heroic Rescue

 

Volumes have been said about Shavarsh Karapetyan’s selfless act of heroism: he has been featured in a myriad of articles, several films and a book. His rescue of 20 people from drowning, which cost the world champion in fin-swimming his health and further achievements in a brilliant athletic career, was so impressive that an asteroid was named after him. But Shavarsh himself doesn’t like to remember that day.
 
In and out through broken glass
 
The exact cause of the accident involving one of Yerevan’s trolleybuses on the chilly morning of September 16, 1976 remains unknown. Some said one of the passengers attacked the driver after a heated verbal exchange, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. Others claimed the driver had a heart attack.
 
As it entered a bridge in central Yerevan, the trolleybus veered off course and rolled downhill into a water reservoir, known as Yerevan Lake. The noise of the crash drew the attention of athletes practicing nearby, 23-year-old finswimming champion Shavarash Karapetyan among them. 

Without giving it much thought, Shavarsh jumped into the water, ordering his brother Kamo, another swimming champion, to help him from the shore. “It was scary at first. It was so loud, as if a bomb went off. I almost drowned several times. I could imagine the agony of those 92 people and I knew how they would die,” Shavarsh told Pravmir.ru.
 
At a depth of 33 feet, the passengers were trapped in an iron sarcophagus. Shavarsh first had to break a window to give people the chance to escape. He hit the glass as hard as he could, knocking it out. There was a high chance that drowning people would instinctively cling to their rescuer and drag him down, but being a professional fin-swimmer Shavarsh knew that it would be best to let them submerge him: at some point, the drowning person would reflexively let go and try to swim up. That’s when he would catch and pull the victim out of the water. “In difficult moments like this, your love for fellow humans grows even stronger,” Shavarsh said in the documentary "Swimmer." 
 
He dove into the cold murky waters of Yerevan Lake some 40 times, going in and out through broken glass, forced to feel around for people in the dark. Each plunge took about 25 seconds. On his last dive, on the verge of fainting, he emerged clutching a seat cushion instead of a victim. “I had nightmares about that cushion for a long time. I could have saved someone else’s life,” Savarsh told Russia's Channel One.

Savarsh pulled 37 people out of the lake, and nine others escaped on their own through the broken window. The rescue operation was set up in a matter of minutes. Doctors who arrived from a nearby hospital treated the victims right on the shore. Unfortunately, only 20 of those Shavarsh rescued could be saved. 
 
One last hooray 
 
Karapetyan was hospitalized along with victims of the accident. Septic fever, double-sided pneumonia and nervous prostration had doctors fighting for his life for over a month. When he was finally discharged, Shavarsh went right back to practice, but swimming underwater echoed painfully in his lungs. Yet the athlete refused to retire without one more medal. 

 
During the next championship he swam in a haze as his brother Kamo ran along the pool, ready to jump in should Shavarsh suddenly lose consciousness. But Shavarsh came in first and set another world record, without realizing it at the time.
 
In the end, the swimmer had to quit the sport – he could no longer bear to be underwater. It made him nauseous.The man who was once called a “goldfish” and an “amphibian” tried coaching, but after just two months he went on to work at an electronics manufacturing plant.
 
The story of the heroic rescue, passed from one person to another, became an urban legend in Yerevan even though the Soviet press kept such accounts of accidents under wraps. Karapetyan’s audacious, self-sacrificing rescue was publicized only six years later, when the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily published an article by journalist Gennady Bocharov with no mention of the death toll. After the publication, tens of thousands of letters from all over the Soviet Union came pouring in for Shavarsh, many of them simply addressed to “The Armenian Republic, Yerevan, Shavarsh Karapetyan.”

 
What makes you human
 
Unlikely as it sounds, the trolleybus rescue was not the first time Shavarsh Karapetyan saved lives. In 1974 the young athlete prevented an accident involving a bus that carried 30 people. The driver had parked the bus to check on some mechanical issue, but left the engine running. Suddenly, the bus began rolling down an incline toward a mountain gorge. Karapetyan, who was on the bus, broke down the partition that separated the driver’s compartment, grabbed the wheel and steered the vehicle away from the abyss.
 
Neither was the trolleybus rescue Shavarsh’s last. In 1985 he happened to be near Yerevan’s Sports and Concert Arena when a fire broke out in the building. Shavarsh was one of the first people rushing to help the firefighters, getting burned and injured in the process. “Anyone can find himself in a place where somebody needs help, and more than once, too,” he said. “The main thing is to remember what makes you human.”
 

Today Shavarsh Karapetyan coaches his son Tigran in hopes that the latter will continue his legacy of athletic achievement. He also heads the Shavarsh Karapetyan Foundation, which organizes competitions for the new generation of swimmers. “Our whole lives, we all owe everything to each other,” is something Savarsh tells young people at every meeting. 
 
The outstanding swimmer’s athletic career was cut short when he was in top form. Karapetyan was forced to retire from major athletics at the age of 24, having set 11 world records and holding 17 world championship titles, 13 European championship titles and seven Soviet championship titles in underwater swimming. 

It’s hard to imagine what else he could have accomplished had he been able to continue. But Shavarsh calls himself a “happy man,” and believes the lives that he saved are the biggest achievement of his life.
 
“Indifference is a very mercurial phenomenon. It depends on the well-being of society,” he says. According to him, there are plenty of examples of humanism to be found today, as long as one looks closely enough: “Kindness is nurtured by love. We have to teach our children to love each other from the very beginning.”
 
-Aurora Humanitarian Initiative

It's Bloody Hot!

 

While April and May are usually the hottest months in many countries in Southeast Asia, hundreds of millions of people are now suffering in South Asia from an exceptionally intense heat wave that has killed hundreds. One expert has already called it the most extreme heat event in history. Record-breaking temperatures above 122º F were reported in the Indian capital of New Delhi and temperatures sizzled to an unheard of 127º F  in parts of India and Pakistan.

Nor was the blazing heat limited to Asia. Heat waves of exceptional severity and duration are now occurring simultaneously in many areas of the world. Mexico and parts of the United States, notably Miami and Phoenix, have recently been in the grip of intense heat events. 

In southern Mexico, endangered howler monkeys in several states have been falling dead from trees in their tropical forests due to heat stroke and dehydration. Below-average rainfall throughout Mexico has led to water shortages in Mexico City and elsewhere. In some places, birds and bats, not to speak of humans, are also dying from the heat.

All of this is no coincidence. The hot and heavy hand of climate change is now upon us. Last year was the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years, and the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere was the highest in four million years and still climbing at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures also reached a peak, causing severe massive coral bleaching in all three major ocean basins.

The World Bank is projecting that, by 2050, there will be more than 200 million climate refugees, 20 times the 10 million refugees that have already destabilized Europe. Climate change is also putting an increasingly heavy burden on our social safety net, which could ultimately cause social order to begin to break down, generating chaos.

Nobel Prize-winning former Energy Secretary Steven Chu now claims it’s no longer possible to keep the global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above the historical average, as the 195-nation signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had hoped. In fact, he projects that the target of 2°C will also be broken and that, by 2050 the global temperature will have risen above 3°C. Nor is his pessimism unique. 

Hundreds of other scientists have recently forecast a strong possibility of hitting 2.5°C, which should hardly be surprising since, for well over 30 years now, global leaders have failed to heed the warnings of climate scientists by moving decisively to phase out fossil fuels and their heat-trapping gases.

What to make of such dire forecasts?

It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the disaster at hand. (Or as famed English poet Samuel Johnson put it centuries ago, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”)

Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40 other nations have already done so, including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be enough. 

As the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the one that historically has contributed the most legacy greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and thorough clean-energy transition. 

But at the moment, of course, this country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal — and should Donald Trump win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the Biden administration’s rhetoric of climate concern has been strong, in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate leadership to others.

Despite the laudable examples of smaller nations like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Paraguay, and Costa Rica that are already at, or within a percentage point or two, of being 100% powered by clean, renewable energy, the world sorely needs the U.S. as a global role model. To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency — 79% of the nation’s energy is now drawn from fossil fuels — a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort...     

-John J. Berger, CounterPunch

It's Bloody Hot! - CounterPunch.org

Willie Mays

Willie Mays, a perennial all-star center fielder for the New York and San Francisco Giants in the 1950s and ’60s whose powerful bat, superb athletic grace and crafty baseball acumen earned him a place with Babe Ruth atop the game’s roster of historic greats, died June 18. He was 93.

The San Francisco Giants announced his death on social media but did not provide other details. Mr. Mays was the oldest living member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

“If there was a guy born to play baseball,” Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams, one of his 1950s contemporaries, said late in life, “it was Willie Mays.”

With such demigods as Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, Mr. Mays, from Jim Crow-era Alabama, was one of the earliest Black players to reach exalted heights in the formerly segregated major leagues. His body of work from 1951 to 1973 included 660 home runs — then the third most of all time — despite a nearly two-year absence for military service.

Baseball has had 150-plus players with higher career batting averages than Mr. Mays’s. There have been swifter base runners and a few more-prolific sluggers over the decades. But Mr. Mays could do it all: The record book says no one showcased a more formidable combination of power, speed, arm strength, wizardry with a glove and steady hitting than No. 24 of the Giants, whom many regard as the best defensive center fielder ever.

Most devotees of hardball history consider Mr. Mays second to Ruth in the game’s pantheon. Some rank Mr. Mays ahead of Ruth, an ace pitcher turned outfielder for the New York Yankees who revolutionized the sport with his titanic bat in the Jazz Age. Advocates for Mr. Mays argue that Ruth didn’t possess Mr. Mays’s all-around skills and never had to compete against Black major leaguers.

At 20, Mr. Mays was National League rookie of the year and helped the Giants reach the 1951 World Series. His 3,293 career hits — including 10 hits in the old Negro American League that were added to his total in 2024 — gave him a robust .301 lifetime average. He was named to 24 All Star teams in 18 seasons, some in years when two such games were played.

While a lot of sluggers were brawny and less than nimble in the field, Mr. Mays, listed on Major League Baseball’s website as 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, dominated opponents with his glove, legs and throwing arm. A miraculous catch he made in the 1954 World Series, racing toward the center field wall with his back fully turned to the infield, is among the most celebrated plays in the annals of the sport.

Starting in 1957, Mr. Mays won 12 consecutive Gold Glove awards for defensive excellence in center field, the most spacious position, where quick reactions and fleetness of foot are paramount. He collected more Gold Gloves than any other center fielder in history, even though the award didn’t exist until his fifth full season.

At the same time, his disruptive speed and guile as a base runner augured a revival of an undervalued aspect of the game.

In the 1950s, a decade loaded with fearsome hitters, the “small ball” tactic of base stealing was mostly an afterthought — but not for Mr. Mays, the first player with 300 or more career home runs to also tally at least 300 thefts (he swiped 339 bases). Only seven others have done it since. Although his yearly totals weren’t jaw-dropping by later standards, he stole more bases (179) in the 1950s than anyone else in the majors.

“Willie Mays is the greatest player I ever laid eyes on,” declared his first Giants manager, Leo Durocher, a teammate of Ruth’s in the late-1920s.

After Robinson broke baseball’s racial barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mr. Mays, three weeks out of his teens, became the 17th Black player to arrive in the big leagues. He debuted for the New York Giants on May 25, 1951, and went hitless in 12 at-bats on the road. Then, in his first plate appearance at the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ old ballpark in Upper Manhattan, he recorded his first hit — “a towering poke that landed atop the left-field roof,” the New York Times reported.

Counting the home run, Mr. Mays, a right-handed batter, began his career 1-for-26, a miserable stretch. “I was crying,” he recalled almost 70 years later. “I wanted to go back” to minor league Minneapolis. But Durocher kept him in the lineup, insisting, “Son, you’re my center fielder.” After Mr. Mays found his stroke, he finished his rookie season with 20 homers and a .274 average.

In scouting parlance, he emerged as “a five-tool player,” with exceptional abilities to hit for power, hit for average, run, field and throw. Yet plenty of five-tool stars have come and gone. What made Mr. Mays transcendent were the dazzling degrees to which he excelled at all five skills for the better part of two decades.

Known for his full-throttle energy on the diamond, his joy and brio, Mr. Mays was a headliner in the postwar golden era of New York baseball, before the Giants and Dodgers decamped to San Francisco and Los Angeles to start the 1958 season. During that Gotham heyday, one or two of the city’s three ballclubs, led by the dynastic Yankees, played in 10 World Series in 11 years — including seven “subway series” — and each team featured a Hall of Fame-bound center fielder.

“Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” the song goes: Mickey Mantle (and before him Joe DiMaggio) of the Yanks, Brooklyn’s Duke Snider and Mr. Mays, who as a rookie would often play stickball with youngsters in front of his Harlem rooming house. Afterward, he’d treat the kids to ice cream, then walk to work at the Polo Grounds.

“Snider, Mantle and Mays — you could get a fat lip in any saloon by starting an argument as to which was best,” columnist Red Smith reminisced in 1972. “One point was beyond argument, though: Willie was by all odds the most exciting.”

In the outfield, where the durable Mr. Mays compiled a record 7,112 putouts, he caught a lot of balls unconventionally, holding his glove near his belt buckle for his signature “basket catch.” And he admitted to wearing ill-fitting caps to ensure that he would run out from under them as he dashed around the bases or chased a long flyball.

“You have to entertain people,” he told sportscaster Bob Costas in 2006. “That’s what I wanted to do all the time.”

Mr. Mays’s nickname, the “Say Hey Kid,” was bestowed by a New York sportswriter who noted the young player’s habit of chirping “hey” when he had something to say (as in “Hey, how you doin'?” and “Hey, where you been?”), according to biographer James S. Hirsch, author of “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend,” published in 2010.

With 660 career homers, Mr. Mays ranked third, behind Aaron and Ruth, until 2004, when the Giants’ Barry Bonds — Mr. Mays’s godson — eclipsed him. In 2015, Alex Rodriguez also passed Mr. Mays in home runs. But Rodriguez and Bonds were tainted by evidence of illicit steroids use. Albert Pujols, who has never been credibly linked to steroids, hit his 661st homer in 2020, dropping Mr. Mays to sixth on the all-time list.

Always averse to controversy, Mr. Mays professed to have no opinion about ballplayers who used performance-enhancing drugs. “I don’t even know what that stuff is,” he said. On April 12, 2004, when Bonds, under a cloud of suspicion, launched his 660th home run, his 72-year-old godfather walked on the field to embrace him… 

-The Washington Post, Paul Duggan

Willie Mays, baseball star of prodigious power and grace, dies at 93 - The Washington Post

 "The only man who could have caught that ball just hit it." - Remembering Willie Howard Mays

“Mays is the only man in baseball I’d pay to see play.” — Ty Cobb

 “Willie Mays is the greatest ballplayer I’ve ever seen. I never saw Joe DiMaggio play, but if Joe DiMaggio was better than Willie Mays, he belongs in Heaven.” — Roberto Clemente

 “Outside of Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays is the greatest all-around baseball player of my time. Certainly, he’s been the most daring. Mays would steal home, a tough play and one in which you’ve got a great chance to look bad. Willie didn’t even think of that, he’d just go. Nine times out of ten, he’d make it.” — Mickey Mantle

“You used to think if the score was 5-0, [Mays] would hit a five-run homer.” — Reggie Jackson

“[Mays] scooped the ball up at the base of the 406-foot sign, whirled and fired. It came in on one bounce, directly in front of the plate, and into the glove of catcher Tom Haller, who put it on the astonished Willie Stargell. It was described by old-timers as the greatest throw ever made in ancient Forbes Field.” — Bob Stevens, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 1965

“I couldn’t believe Mays could throw that far. I figured there had to be a relay. Then I found out there wasn’t. He’s too good for this world.” — Willie Stargell

“They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.” — Ted Williams

“Willie Mays, to me, was the best ballplayer I ever saw in my life. …Nobody in the history of baseball is going to see anyone like Willie Mays. Everybody loved Willie in the clubhouse. Willie used to do a lot of things for different players, especially the rookies. Willie used to take players to clothing stores to buy them clothes. Sometimes he would get free clothes, shoes, and stuff, and give them to the players. He was like the mother of the team.” - Juan Marichal

"Willie Mays was to me the greatest player I ever watched. People ask me that, and I don't hesitate....he could have been an All-Star shortstop, that's how good an athlete he was...he could run backwards as fast as he could forward." - Don Zimmer

"If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I'd still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better” - Leo Durocher

"The best Major League ballplayer I ever saw was Willie Mays. Ruth beat you with the bat. Ted Williams beat you with the bat. Joe DiMaggio beat you with the bat, his glove and his arm. But Willie Mays could beat you with the bat, with power, his glove, his arm and with the running. He could beat you any way that's possible." - Buck O'Neil

“Hopefully, they can say, ‘There goes the best baseball player in the world.’ I honestly believe I did everything in baseball that a baseball player can do, and I did it with love.” — Willie Mays