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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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Alistair Cooke
Age: 95 †
Born: 1908
Born: November 20
Died: 2004
Died: March 30
Journalist
Radio Personality
Television Presenter
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Race
America
Country
Decadence
Idealism
Vitality
Cynicism
More quotes by Alistair Cooke
It's an acting job - acting natural.
Alistair Cooke
If computers take over, it will serve us right.
Alistair Cooke
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.
Alistair Cooke
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
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
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.
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
Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke
[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.
Alistair Cooke
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
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Alistair Cooke
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
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
Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke
[Golfers] are a special kind of moral realist who nips the normal romantic and idealistic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.
Alistair Cooke
Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
Alistair Cooke
Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
Alistair Cooke
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'.
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
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke