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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
Country
Decadence
Idealism
Vitality
Cynicism
Race
America
More quotes by Alistair Cooke
Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
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 is, in fact, just like chicken - only tougher.
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
Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
Alistair Cooke
Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
Alistair Cooke
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
Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.
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
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
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
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
[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
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
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
Alistair Cooke
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
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Alistair Cooke
Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
Alistair Cooke
More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.
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