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People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.

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
Lean
Britain
Radio
Forward
Listening
America
Back
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More quotes by Alistair Cooke

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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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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.
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They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
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[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.
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Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.
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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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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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Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
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There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.
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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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Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.
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But afterall it's not the winning that matters, is it? Or is it? It'sto coinawordtheamenitiesthatcount: thesmell of the dandelions, the puff of the pipe, the click of the bat, the rain on the neck, the chill down the spine, the slow, exquisite coming on of sunset and dinner and rheumatism.
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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.
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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 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