Alistair Cooke Quotes (25 Quotes)

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.

Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeles's 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.

Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.

Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.

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.

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.

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah.

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.

Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.

A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn't particularly feel like it.

It's an acting job - acting natural.

Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.

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. There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.

To watch an American on a beach or crowding into a subway, or buying a theater ticket, or sitting at home with his radio on, tells you something about one aspect of the American character the capacity to withstand a great deal of outside interference, so to speak a willing acceptance of frenzy which though its never self-conscious, amounts o a willingness to let other people have and assert their own lively, and even offensive, character. They are a tough race in this.

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.

These humiliations are the essence of the game.

People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.

In 1889 the last big tract of Indian land was declared open for settlement, in Oklahoma. The claimants and the speculators mounted their horses and lined up like trotters waiting for a starting gun. The itchy ones jumped the gun and were ever after known as Soonersand Oklahoma was thereafter called the Sooner State.

Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.

I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.

In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly, that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the 1st place the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.