Alistair Cooke

Journalist

1908-11-20 – 2004-03-30

Alistair Cooke was a British-American journalist, television personality, and broadcaster.

Quotes by Alistair Cooke

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.
Read quote
As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.
Read quote
Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Read quote
Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America's vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in themselves and their institutions.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
The South is one of those kingdoms of the mind, like India or Scotland, that are neat and understandable only to people who have never been there.
Read quote
No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
Read quote
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Read quote
Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.
Read quote