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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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Alistair Cooke
Age: 95 †
Born: 1908
Born: November 20
Died: 2004
Died: March 30
Journalist
Radio Personality
Television Presenter
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Imposed
Failed
Luxury
Discipline
Liberty
Nations
Others
Self
Historically

More quotes 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.
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New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
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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
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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.
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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.
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The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.
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People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.
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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.
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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.
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The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
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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.
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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.
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I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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The day of judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.
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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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.
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke