Alistair Cooke quotes

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)
(Las Vegas) composes a night-time image of Babylon in the desert. But it is Everyman's 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 emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution. It says: 'Topless Pizza Lunch.' View quote
Alistair Cooke
Some people say we are on the verge of the Second Civil War. And it may be so. But even on the darkest days, cheerfulness kept breaking in. I am not by nature a 'Whither America?' man. View quote
Alistair Cooke
During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers; from Estes Kefauver amid the snows of New Hampshire to Jack Nicklaus amid the azaleas of Augusta, Georgia; from Henry Kaiser's Liberty ships to Francis Chichester's Gypsy Moth sailing into Staten Island at one in the morning; from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood; from Senator Joseph McCarthy's last stand to the massacre of Muhammad Ali by Joe Frazier. View quote
Alistair Cooke
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. View quote
Alistair Cooke
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it. View quote
Alistair Cooke
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. View quote
Alistair Cooke
Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence. View quote
Alistair Cooke
Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper. View quote
Alistair Cooke
Moving among wretched people in mean places, as I often saw him do, he had the impulses of a saint but not the serenity. View quote
Alistair Cooke
All Presidents start out pretending 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. (Alistair Cooke)
Probably, I wound up-if not as a jack-of-all-trades-at best as a thirdrate polymath never able to focus these curiosities into a commanding "view of life.” The most practical solution appeared to be to make a profession of observation, to become a reporter simply, a profession easily damned as that of a fence-sitter, a moral coward unwilling to take a stand, a chronic water-treader who lacks the strength to take the plunge. To these strictures, I can only reply that once every four years at least I take a stand: I vote. And immediately afterward return to my reporting habits and the continuing discovery that in life the range of irreconcilable points of view, characters, flaws, idiosyncrasies and virtues is astounding, and that in politics there is very often much to be said on both sides, and sometimes on three or four. View quote
Alistair Cooke
One hundred years after the Declaration that 'all men are created equal,' there began to gather in Newport a colony of the rich, determined to show that some Americans were conspicuously more equal than others. View quote
Alistair Cooke
(The Negro) is a permanent invalid in American society. And the places he lives, whether in the town or the country, are its casualty wards. View quote
Alistair Cooke
Even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet. In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. And 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 presumably designed in the first place, and which the gravest statesmen and the hoarsest politicians hope to make available to all men in the end: I mean the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to sit under trees, to read, to hit a ball and bounce the baby. View quote
Alistair Cooke
He was at his best only when the going was good. View quote
Alistair Cooke
In life no such colour brightened the grey picture of a man devoted to the daily study of warfare on several continents with all the ardour of a certified public accountant. View quote
Alistair Cooke
He measured all his fellow workers by the test of professionalism, and a professional is a man who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it. View quote
Alistair Cooke
As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later. View quote
Alistair Cooke
Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks. View quote
Alistair Cooke
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)
It's an acting job - acting natural. View quote
Alistair Cooke
In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game. View quote
Alistair Cooke
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men. View quote
Alistair Cooke
People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back. View quote
Alistair Cooke