Alistair Cooke Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.”
-- Alistair CookeSource : Alistair Cooke (2012). “Reporting America”, p.14, The Overlook Press
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“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 CookeSource : "Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence". Book by David Wilkinson, p. 3, August 1, 2013.
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“New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
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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 -
“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 CookeSource : Alistair Cooke (2015). “Talk About America: 1951–1968”, p.15, Open Road Media
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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.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 CookeSource : Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.63, Arcade Publishing
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“In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
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“More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“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.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“Sir Guy Campbell's classic account of the formation of the links, beginning with Genesis and moving step by step to the thrilling arrival of 'tilth' on the fingers of coastal land, suggests that such notable features of our planet as dinosaurs, the prairies, the Himalayas, the seagull, the female of the species herself, were accidental by-products of the Almighty's preoccupation with the creation of the Old Course at St. Andrews.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“It rose slowly like a gull sensing a reckless blue fish to close to the surface, and then it dived relentlessly for the green, kicked and stopped three feet short of the flag.”
-- 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 -
“[Golfers] are a special kind of moral relist who nips the normal romantic and idealstic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“I wrote to Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I said: "Here is the sentence once written by the immortal Bobby Jones. I thought you might like to have it done in needlepoint and mounted in a suitable frame to hang over Little John's bed. It says, The rewards of golf - and of life, too, I expect - are worth very little if you don't play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules." I never heard from Mr. McEnroe, Senior. I can only conclude that the letter went astray.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“It is a wonderful tribute to the game or to the dottiness of the people who play it that for some people somewhere there is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle, an unplayable course, the wrong time of the day or year.”
-- 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 -
“Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“To get an elementary grasp of the game of golf, a human must learn, by endless practice, a continuous and subtle series of highly unnatural movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.”
-- Alistair CookeSource : Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.62, Arcade Publishing
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“Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
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“The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“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 -
“I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.”
-- Alistair CookeSource : Alistair Cooke (2015). “Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.50, Open Road Media
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“The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican of golf - is of St. Andrew himself bearing the slatier cross on which, once he was captured at Patras, he was to be stretched before he was crucified.Only the Scots would have thought of celebrating a national game with the figure of a tortured saint.”
-- Alistair Cooke -
“So the British, of all ages, still walk the course. On trips to Florida or the American desert, they still marvel, or shudder, at the fleets of electric carts going off in the morning like the first assault wave at the Battle of El Alamein. It is unlikely, for some time, that a Briton will come across in his native land such a scorecard as Henry Longhurst rescued from a California club and cherished till the day he died. The last on its list of local rules printed the firm warning "A Player on Foot Has No Standing on the Course."”
-- Alistair Cooke
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