Alistair Cooke Quotes

59 quotes in 1113 categories

• Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
• The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.
• 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…
• In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.
• Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
• There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book…
• 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…
• So the British, of all ages, still walk the course. On trips to Florida or the American desert, they still marvel, or shudder, at the…
• 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…
• The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
• 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…
• I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.
• They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
• The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican of golf -…
• [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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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'…
• 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…
• 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…

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