Top 52 Alistair Cooke Quotes
#1. Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
Alistair Cooke
#3. Although the Jeffersonian Law ("All men are created equal") is the first article of the American faith, the facts of American life have demonstrated for some time now that it is an irksome faith to live by.
Alistair Cooke
#4. Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.
Alistair Cooke
#5. I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.
Alistair Cooke
#6. It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
Alistair Cooke
#7. To the goggling unbeliever Texans say, as people always say about their mangier dishes, 'But it's just like chicken, only tenderer.' Rattlesnake is, in fact, just like chicken - only tougher.
Alistair Cooke
#8. These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges.
Alistair Cooke
#9. The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
Alistair Cooke
#10. Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeless land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways, garages, gas stations, car lots, parking lots. And all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air.
Alistair Cooke
#11. Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
Alistair Cooke
#13. A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Alistair Cooke
#14. People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster.
Alistair Cooke
#15. I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.
Alistair Cooke
#16. It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.
Alistair Cooke
#17. Like a christening, a wedding, a graduation ceremony, a holy war, a revolutioneven?a fireworksdisplay, agaudy promise of what life ought to be, not life itself.
Alistair Cooke
#18. I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.
Alistair Cooke
#19. They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
Alistair Cooke
#21. Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.
Alistair Cooke
#22. Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
Alistair Cooke
#23. Americans are less mystical about what produced their inland or meadow courses; they are the product of the bulldozerm rotary ploughs, mowers, sprinkler systems and alarmingly generous wads of folding money.
Alistair Cooke
#24. New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
#25. It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America's vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in themselves and their institutions.
Alistair Cooke
#26. But afterall it's not the winning that matters, is it? Or is it? It'sto coinawordtheamenitiesthatcount: thesmell of the dandelions, the puff of the pipe, the click of the bat, the rain on the neck, the chill down the spine, the slow, exquisite coming on of sunset and dinner and rheumatism.
Alistair Cooke
#27. It rose slowly like a gull sensing a reckless blue fish to close to the surface, and then it dived relentlessly for the green, kicked and stopped three feet short of the flag.
Alistair Cooke
#29. People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.
Alistair Cooke
#30. The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.
Alistair Cooke
#31. As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.
Alistair Cooke
#32. I hasten to say to snobs from the Surrey pine-and-sand country that no invention since the corn plaster or the electric toothbrush has brought greater balm to the extremities of the senior golfer than the golfmobile, a word that will have to do for want of a better.
Alistair Cooke
#33. Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
Alistair Cooke
#34. The South is one of those kingdoms of the mind, like India or Scotland, that are neat and understandable only to people who have never been there.
Alistair Cooke
#35. When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio because the pictures were better.
Alistair Cooke
#36. America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.
Alistair Cooke
#37. To get an elementary grasp of the game of golf, a human must learn, by endless practice, a continuous and subtle series of highly unnatural movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.
Alistair Cooke
#39. There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.
Alistair Cooke
#40. The day of judgment is either approaching or
it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I
choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be
brought.
Alistair Cooke
#41. The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.
Alistair Cooke
#42. Curiosity ... endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
Alistair Cooke
#43. [Golfers] are a special kind of moral relist who nips the normal romantic and idealstic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.
Alistair Cooke
#44. Las Vegas is Everymans cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperors orgy is now a democratic institution. Topless Pizza Lunch.
Alistair Cooke
#46. I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.
Alistair Cooke
#47. It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.
Alistair Cooke
#48. No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
Alistair Cooke
#49. Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
Alistair Cooke
#50. Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
Alistair Cooke
#51. I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.
Alistair Cooke
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