Alistair Cooke Quotes

"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."

"People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back."

"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."

"Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men."

"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."

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

"Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper."

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

"These humiliations are the essence of the game."

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

"Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence."

"Canned music is like audible wallpaper."

"A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn't particularly feel like it."

"It's an acting job - acting natural."

"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."

"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. There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes."

"Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeles's land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways, garages, gas stations, car lots, parking lots. And all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air."