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Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.

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
Birth
Close
Blasphemy
Side
Festivals
Sides
Secular
Christian
Birthday
Come
Washington
Country
Christmas
Dare

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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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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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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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Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
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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.
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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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[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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Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
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Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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If computers take over, it will serve us right.
Alistair Cooke
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Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke
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[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.
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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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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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The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
Alistair Cooke