Alistair Cooke Quotes

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.

It's an acting job - acting natural.

If computers take over, it will serve us right.

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

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.

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.

I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.

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.

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.

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.

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

Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.

More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.

The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.

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.

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

The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican of golf - is of St. Andrew himself bearing the slatier cross on which, once he was captured at Patras, he was to be stretched before he was crucified.Only the Scots would have thought of celebrating a national game with the figure of a tortured saint.

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.

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.

I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.

Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.

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

Sir Guy Campbell's classic account of the formation of the links, beginning with Genesis and moving step by step to the thrilling arrival of 'tilth' on the fingers of coastal land, suggests that such notable features of our planet as dinosaurs, the prairies, the Himalayas, the seagull, the female of the species herself, were accidental by-products of the Almighty's preoccupation with the creation of the Old Course at St. Andrews.

No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.

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.

I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.

These humiliations are the essence of the game.

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.

They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.

[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.

[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 Sooners-and Oklahoma was thereafter called the Sooner State.

The Scots say that Nature itself dictated that golf should be played by the seashore. Rather, the Scots saw in the eroded sea coasts a cheap battleground on which they could whip their fellow men in a game based on the Calvinist doctrine that man is meant to suffer here below and never more than when he goes out to enjoy himself.

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.

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 it's 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.

I wrote to Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I said: "Here is the sentence once written by the immortal Bobby Jones. I thought you might like to have it done in needlepoint and mounted in a suitable frame to hang over Little John's bed. It says, The rewards of golf - and of life, too, I expect - are worth very little if you don't play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules." I never heard from Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I can only conclude that the letter went astray.

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.

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.

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.