Alistair Cooke

It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America's vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in…

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican…

— Alistair Cooke

If computers take over, it will serve us right.

— Alistair Cooke

[In 1889] the last big tract of Indian land was declared open for settlement, in Oklahoma. The claimants and the speculators mounted…

— Alistair Cooke

“Every sport pretends to be literature. . .”

— Alistair Cooke

To watch an American on a beach, or crowding into a subway, or buying a theatre ticket, or sitting at home with…

— Alistair Cooke

To the goggling unbeliever Texans say, as people always say about their mangier dishes, 'But it's just like chicken, only tenderer.' Rattlesnake…

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

I hasten to say to snobs from the Surrey pine-and-sand country that no invention since the corn plaster or the electric toothbrush…

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

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

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

— Alistair Cooke

There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit…

— Alistair Cooke

It's an acting job - acting natural.

— Alistair Cooke

In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to…

— Alistair Cooke

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to…

— Alistair Cooke

These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert…

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeles's land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways,…

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having…

— Alistair Cooke

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art,…

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of…

— Alistair Cooke