A Quote by Simon Kuper

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.
This country just has a different set of priorities. It's the same thing with soccer as with volleyball. If soccer is going to struggle to have a pro league after the most successful World Cup in history, it's even more of a struggle for other sports.
The common vision is winning - and winning a World Cup. We have a three-year plan - win the World Cup, win the Olympics, win the Euros - and the common agreement is you want to create a legacy and win the World Cup; then, everything else falls into place.
My teammates and I are best known for our penalty kick victory against China to win the 1999 Women's World Cup. But a lot of people don't realize that when we were first playing soccer on the Women's National Team, the Women's World Cup didn't exist. In fact, Women's Soccer wasn't even in the Olympics.
To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can't stand.
In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.
Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together.
Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations.
To participate in a World Cup is a great honour and achievement. I've played in three World Cups. The whole world watches you during a World Cup and expects you to play innings to win games for your country.
The simultaneous reactions elicited all over the world by the reading of newspaper dispatches about the same events create, as it were, a common mental pulse beat for the whole of civilized mankind.
Soccer is a great game, and the rich variety of styles and passions that come with being truly global makes the World Cup a nonpareil event in the universe of competitive sport.
What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake.
You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with those people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.
You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.
What sort of Europe do we want to have? Parallel societies? Muslim communities living together with the Christian community?
You know the marathon in my country is just exceptional. It's like soccer in England. If England win the world cup and Ethiopia win the marathon - it's the same.
You know, I feel like people in this country who feel really strongly about a man and a woman being the only -- the sole sort of gatekeeper of marriage should also support people staying together. I mean, a lot of heterosexual couples don't stay together, and I think that's as upsetting as two people who are really committed and loving and have been monogamous for many years wanting to ... be married and have -- share some of the same rights that this country is so uniquely qualified to give people.
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