Quotes from Alistair Cooke

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.

I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

A professional is a man who can do his best at a time when he doesn't particularly feel like it.

Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill scoured by a whiff of arrogance.

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."

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.

Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.

A professional is someone who can do his best when he doesn't feel like it.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

[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.

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.

Every sport pretends to be literature. . .

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.

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

Curiosity…endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.

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.

It's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame.' I

President Franklin Roosevelt] was a great tickler of sacred cows not bred on his own pastures.