A bomb under the West car park at Twickenham on an international day would end fascism in England for a generation.
- Philip Toynbee

A major rugby tour by the British Isles to New Zealand is a cross between a medieval crusade and a prep school outing.
- John Hopkins

After England had been humbled by New Zealand in the World Cup semi-final: “I don’t know about us not having a Plan B when things went wrong, we looked like we didn’t have a Plan A.”
- Geoff Cooke (1995)

A vote for Japan is a vote for the future of rugby. We will do our best to make rugby a global sport.
- Yoshiro Mori

Beer and Rugby are more or less synonymous.
- Chris Laidlaw

Don’t ask me about emotions in the Welsh dressing room. I’m someone who cries when he watches Little House on the Prairie.
- Robert Norster (1994)

England’s coach Jack Powell, an immensely successful businessman, has the acerbic wit of Dorothy Parker and, according to most New Zealanders, a similar knowledge of rugby.
- Mark Reason Total Sport (1996)

He was a professional rugby player in the area that I played as a youngster. So a lot of people who I went to school with knew who he was and knew that he was black. So I would get racist taunts in school.
- Ryan Giggs

Most Misleading Campaign of 1991: England’s rugby World Cup squad, who promoted a scheme called ‘Run with the Ball’. Not, unfortunately, among themselves.
- Time Out (1991)

If the game is run properly as a professional game, you do not need 57 old farts running rugby.
- Will Carling (1995)

I’m still an amateur, of course, but I became rugby’s first millionaire five years ago.
- David Campese (1991)

On England’s new look against Australia: “This looks a good team on paper, let’s see how it looks on grass.
- Nigel Mellville (1984)

On his son Huw’s choice to play for England: “I knew he would never play for Wales … he’s tone deaf.
- Vemon Davies (1981)

On playing for Wales at Lansdowne Road, Dublin: “I didn’t know what was going on at the start in the swirling wind. The flags were all pointing in different directions and I thought the Irish had starched them just to fool us.”
- Mike Watkins (1984)

On Wales losing 28-9 against Australia: “No leadership, no ideas. Not even enough imagination to thump someone in the line-up when the ref wasn’t looking.”
- J.P.R. Williams (1984)

Pre-game pep talk before facing England: “Look what these bastards have done to Wales. They’ve taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our houses and they only live in them for a fortnight every 12 months. What have they given us? Absolutely nothing. We’ve been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English - and that’s who you are playing this afternoon.”
- Phil Bennett (1977)

Remember that rugby is a team game; all 14 of you make sure you pass the ball to Jonah.
- Anon fax to N.Z. team (1995)

Rugby is not like tea, which is good only in England, with English water and English milk. On the contrary, rugby would be better, frankly, if it were made in a Twickenham pot and warmed up in a Pyrenean cauldron.
- Dennis LaLanne (1960)

Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.
- Oscar Wilde

Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen; soccer is a gentleman’s game played by beasts; football is a beastly game played by beasts.
- Henry Blaha

Rugby is great.The players don’t wear helmets or padding; they just beat the living daylights out of each other and then go for a beer.I love that.
- Joe Theismann

Subdue and penetrate.
- The motto of the All-Blacks

The French selectors never do anything by halves; for the first international of the season against Ireland they dropped half the three-quarter line.
- Nigel Starmer-Smith, BBC TV (1974)

The whole point of rugby is that it is, first and foremost, a state of mind, a spirit.
- Jean-Pierre Rives

The job of Welsh coach is like a minor part in a Quentin Tarantino film: you stagger on, you hallucinate, nobody seems to understand a word you say, you throw up, you get shot. Poor old Kevin Bowring has come up through the coaching structure so he knows what it takes … 15 more players than Wales have at present.
- Mark Reason Total Sport (1996)

The tactical difference between Football and Rugby with its varieties seems to be that in the former, the ball is the missile, in the latter, men are the missles.
- Alfred E. Crawley

The only hope for the England rugby union team is to play it all for laughs. It would pack them in if the public address system at Twickenham was turned up full blast to record the laughs at every inept bit of passing, kicking or tackling. The nation would be in fits … and on telly the BBC would not need a commentator but just a tape of that Laughing Policeman, turning it loud at the most hilarious bits.
- Jim Rivers, letter to The Guardian (1979)

What happens when a game of football is proposed at Christmas among a party of your men assembled from different schools? Alas! … The Eton man is enamoured of his own rules, and turns up his nose at Rugby as not sufficiently aristocratic, while the Rugbeian retorts that ‘bullying’ and ’sneaking’ are not to his taste, and he is not afraid of his shins, or of a ‘maul’ or ’scrimmage’. On hearing this the Harrovian pricks up his ears, and though he might previously have sided with Rugby, the insinuation against the courage of those who do not allow ’shinning’ arouses his ire, and causes him to refuse to lay with one who has offered it. Thus it is found impossible to get up a game.” - Editorial, The Field, 1861, reflecting the confused state of affairs that existed in the years before rugby and football emerged as separate disciplines.
- Unknown

You can go to the end of time, the last World Cup in the history of mankind, and the All-Blacks will be favourites for it.
- Phil Kearns