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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

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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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The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
Alistair Cooke
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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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Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
Alistair Cooke
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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
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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
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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 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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The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.
Alistair Cooke
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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
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They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
Alistair Cooke
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A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Alistair Cooke
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I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.
Alistair Cooke
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It's an acting job - acting natural.
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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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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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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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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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 movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.
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