Alistair Cooke Quotes

"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."

"Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper."

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

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

"These humiliations are the essence of the game."

"Canned music is like audible wallpaper."

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

"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."

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