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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.

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
Lasts
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Jumped
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Ones
Settlement
Tract
Bigs
Land
Declared
Itchy
States
Open
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Ever
Called
Sooner
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Like
Waiting
Indian
Speculators
State
Gun
Lined
Known
Starting
Oklahoma

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A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
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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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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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These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges
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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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Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
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Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
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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'.
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Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
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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.
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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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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.
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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'.
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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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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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Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
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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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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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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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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