Quotes from Alistair Cooke

People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.

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.

Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.

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.

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.

Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.

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

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

If computers take over, it will serve us right.

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

These humiliations are the essence of the game.

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.

No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.

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.