Quotes by Alistair Cooke

“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.”

“Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.”

“Every sport pretends to be literature. . .”

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

“Canned music is like audible wallpaper.”

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

“Even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet. In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. And it would be a crime again...”

“In life no such colour brightened the grey picture of a man devoted to the daily study of warfare on several continents with all the ardour of a certified public accountant.”

“Some people say we are on the verge of the Second Civil War. And it may be so. But even on the darkest days, cheerfulness kept breaking in. I am not by nature a 'Whither America?' man.”

“All Presidents start out pretending 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.”

“LSD ... is one of the company of drugs now known as hallucinogens, and there is no doubt that in some people it produces exquisite visions. The big question is whether they are of the outer or inne...”

“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.”

“Probably, I wound up—if not as a jack-of-all-trades—at best as a thirdrate polymath never able to focus these curiosities into a commanding view of life. The most practical solution appeared to be ...”

“During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black mar...”

“One hundred years after the Declaration that 'all men are created equal,' there began to gather in Newport a colony of the rich, determined to show that some Americans were conspicuously more equal...”

“He was at his best only when the going was good.”

“He measured all his fellow workers by the test of professionalism, and a professional is a man who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.”

“Moving among wretched people in mean places, as I often saw him do, he had the impulses of a saint but not the serenity.”

“Cooke is a nuisance. He telephones his copy at the last moment, so that everything else has to be dropped to get it into the paper. He says that he will be in Chicago and turns up in Los Angeles. H...”