Yogi Berra

 
 
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POSTED: May 13, 2006
 
 
 
 
 

Yogi Berra was something very big in baseball. Outside of the arcane world of baseball obsessives, though, he is remembered as much for the things he said as for the things he did. Among the many things he is quoted as saying is:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

I came across that somewhere recently, and was reminded of the first time I heard it, years ago. I remember being unable to decide, from anything I read, whether or not Yogi Berra was really a very smart man pretending to be dumb for the same professional reasons that Mick Jagger used to be a middle-class boy who was pretending to be a working-class boy who was pretending to be surprised that he was an international playboy.

I googled and found this page which also contains many more Yogi Berra quotations, including this one, which I had also seen years ago and subsequently forgotten about:

I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.