Alistair Cooke: When television came roaring in after the war (World W...

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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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

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All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah.

Alistair Cooke

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

Alistair Cooke

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

Alistair Cooke

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They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.

Alistair Cooke

said golf years

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 Cooke

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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

equality law men

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

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To watch an American on a beach, or crowding into a subway, or buying a theatre ticket, or sitting at home with his radio on, tells you something about one aspect of the American character: the capacity to withstand a great deal of outside interference, so to speak; a willing acceptance of frenzy which, though it's never self-conscious, amounts to a willingness to let other people have and assert their own lively, and even offensive, character. They are a tough race in this.

Alistair Cooke

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I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.

Alistair Cooke

radio tvs

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

Alistair Cooke

enthusiasm two years

Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.

Alistair Cooke

wheeling intelligence curiosity

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

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The day of judgment is either approaching or

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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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 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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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.