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Like a christening, a wedding, a graduation ceremony, a holy war, a revolutioneven?a fireworksdisplay, agaudy promise of what life ought to be, not life itself.
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
Ceremony
Wedding
Promise
Holy
Ought
War
Life
Christening
Like
Graduation
More quotes by Alistair Cooke
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
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
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
[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
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
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
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
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.
Alistair Cooke
They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
Alistair Cooke
I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.
Alistair Cooke
If computers take over, it will serve us right.
Alistair Cooke
Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.
Alistair Cooke
Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their 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
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
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
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.
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