From Mickey Mantle to Mike Messina, people all around the world love baseball, even people you may not associate with the sport, like politicians, celebrities, writers, entertainers, and world leaders. Take a few minutes to check out what they have to say, because you just may discover a connection between baseball and life itself:

When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing. I told him I wanted to be a real Major League baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he’d like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.–Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the USA.

I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there.–Jackie Robinson

Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms… The game of ball is glorious.–Walt Whitman

A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz.–Humphrey Bogart, actor.

Catching a flyball is a pleasure, but knowing what to do with it after you catch it is a business.–Tommy Henrich

The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love.–Bryant Gumbel, 1981

There is still nothing in life as constant and as changing at the same time as an afternoon at a ballpark.–Larry King, host of CNN’s Larry King Live.

We’re ballplayers. We fail most of the time.–Dave Henderson

Every member of our baseball team at West Point became a general: this proves the value of team sports.–General Omar Bradley

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.–Rogers Hornsby

‘This is America,’ my father used to say to me, ‘and in this country, a smart young fellow like you can grow up and do just about anything.’ My dad, no doubt, was thinking doctor, lawyer, teacher, scientist or businessman. I was thinking second baseman, New York Yankees.–Senator Joseph Lieberman

No baseball fan has to explain his mania to any other baseball fan. They are a fraternity. It is less easy, often it is hopeless, to try to explain it to anyone else. You grow technical, and you do not make sense. You grow sentimental, and you are deemed soft in the head. How, the benighted outsider ask you with no little condescension, can you grow sentimental about a cold-blooded professional sport? –John K. Hutchens

I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. And the only church that truly feeds the soul, day-in day-out, is the Church of Baseball.–Susan Sarandon, actress, as Annie Savoy in Bull Durham.
Baseball is more than a game to me, it’s a religion.–William J Klem, umpire, seen on Klem’s Hall of Fame plaque

Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.–Mark Twain, author

I’m not afraid. To be an athlete and to put yourself out in front of people, oftentimes you fail more than you succeed, but the athlete doesn’t think about that. He thinks about winning, not the fear of losing.–Kevin Costner, E! Online interview.

The game has a cleanness. If you do a good job, the numbers say so. You don’t have to ask anyone or play politics. You don’t have to wait for reviews.–Sandy Koufax

Baseball is green and safe. It has neither the street intimidation of basketball nor the controlled Armageddon of football…. Baseball is a green dream that happens on summer nights in safe places in unsafe cities.–Luke Salisbury, author

I believe in the Rip Van Winkle Theory: that a man from 1910 must be able to wake up after being asleep for seventy years, walk into a ballpark and understand baseball perfectly.–Bowie Kuhn, Commissioner of Baseball (1969-1984)

Baseball has no penalties at all. A home run is a home run. You cheer. In football, on a score, you look for flags. If there’s one, who’s it on? When can we cheer? Football acts can be repealed. Baseball acts stand forever.–Thomas Boswell, author

I don’t know how anyone can put on a uniform and not care about winning.–Dave LaPoint

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose-unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.–Robert Frost, author.

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, and the lesson afterwards.–Vernon Law, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.– James Earl Jones as Terence Mann, in Field of Dreams

No one can stop a home run. No one can understand what it really is, unless you have felt it in your own hands and body. As the ball makes its high, long arc beyond the playing field, the diamond and the stands suddenly belong to one man. In that brief, brief time, you are free of all demands and complications.–adaharu Oh, Tokyo Giants Outfielder and All-Time Homerun Leader

Great is Baseball.The National Tonic.The Revival of Hope.The Restorer of Confidence.–“The Sporting News“, circa 1930′s

Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.–Satchel Paige

It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.–A. Bartlett Giamatti, Renaissance scholar, President of Yale University, and the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, from “The Green Fields of the Mind”

One thing anyone can go through is a slump. Unless you’re Greg Maddux, it’s going to happen to everybody.–Mike Piazza, Dodgers’ catcher

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

How about that Johnny Damon? That’s the way every baseball player should be.–David Letterman on The Late Show With David Letterman.

On the best thing about baseball: “There’s no homework.” – Dan Quisenberry

Baseball is what gets inside you, it lights you up, its supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. The HARD is what makes it great.– From the movie, A League of Their Own

Baseball is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed, and the only one in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn…It is a haunted game in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope–and coming home.–Ken Burns’ Baseball, PBS series.

Next to religion, baseball has furnished a greater impact on American life than any other institution.–Herbert Hoover

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.–Jackie Robinson

You know, and it was part of the character of growing up in a city where, you know, it’s not the warmest or the prettiest city in the country, you know what I mean, and we didn’t have the best baseball team. But you know, there were a lot of things that you just, we grew up there, we lived there, and that’s who we were. And there was a spirit and character of the city that says like take pride in that.–Ben Affleck, actor, from the Larry King Live show, CNN.com.

But I guess I’m here not so much to speak for myself, as to simply represent the millions of baseball loving kids who grew up in the 50′s and 60′s and for whom Mickey Mantle was baseball. And more than that, he was a presence in our lives. A fragile hero, to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic…Bob Costas, delivering Mickey Mantle’s eulogy.

Character, Courage, Loyalty.–Little League Motto

My heroine (Trisha) would be a child of divorce living with her mother and maintaining a meaningful connection with her father mostly through their mutual love of baseball and the Boston Red Sox. Lost in the woods, she’d find herself imagining that her favorite Red Sox player was with her, keeping her company and guiding her through the terrible situation in which she found herself. Tom Gordon, #36, would be that player. Gordon is a real pitcher for the Red Sox; without his consent I wouldn’t have wanted to publish the book. He did give it, for which I am deeply grateful.–Stephen King, on writing his book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, from CNN.com.

It’s a great day in baseball.

Good luck.