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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'.

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
Thinking
Art
Finished
Chairs
States
Products
Preserves
Best
Works
Poem
Firsts
Took
Definition
First
Painting
Final
Coined
Work
Building
Definitions
Roger
Mind
State
Finals
Chair
Think
Whether
Valuable
Preserve

More quotes by Alistair Cooke

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Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.
Alistair Cooke
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It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America's vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in themselves and their institutions.
Alistair Cooke
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New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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If computers take over, it will serve us right.
Alistair Cooke
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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 best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.
Alistair Cooke
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I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.
Alistair Cooke
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Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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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.
Alistair Cooke
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No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
Alistair Cooke
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I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.
Alistair Cooke
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Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
Alistair Cooke
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Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
Alistair Cooke
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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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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