Alistair Cooke Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

Alistair Cooke
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
Cocktail music he accepts as audible wallpaper.

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
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
Las Vegas is Everyman's cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution... 'Topless Pizza Lunch.'

Alistair Cooke
Humiliations are the essence of the game. They derive from the fact that the human anatomy is exquisitely designed to do practically anything but play golf.

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 Cooke
Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

Alistair Cooke
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.

Alistair Cooke
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
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.

Alistair Cooke
The day of judgment is either approaching or
it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I
choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be
brought.

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

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

Alistair Cooke
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 of the Battle of El Alamein.

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 Cooke
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.

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
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.

Alistair Cooke
Of all forms of exercise theoretically designed for recreation and relaxation none can be so unerringly guaranteed to produce nervous exhaustion and despair leading to severe mental illness and, in some cases, petulance.

Alistair Cooke
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
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
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 than others.

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