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

Alistair Cooke

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Alistair Cooke
Age: 95 †
Born: 1908
Born: November 20
Died: 2004
Died: March 30
Journalist
Radio Personality
Television Presenter
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
People
Pretends
Sport
Sports
Literature
Every
Believe

More quotes by Alistair Cooke

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Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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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
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.
Alistair Cooke
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No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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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 balm to the extremities of the senior golfer than the golfmobile, a word that will have to do for want of a better.
Alistair Cooke
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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 no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.
Alistair Cooke
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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
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New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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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
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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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
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Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
Alistair Cooke
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When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio because the pictures were better.
Alistair Cooke