Top 40 Alistair Cooke Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Alistair Cooke

2. “Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.”

— Alistair Cooke

3. “I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.”

— Alistair Cooke

4. “Canned music is like audible wallpaper.”

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

6. “Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.”

— Alistair Cooke

7. “I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.”

— Alistair Cooke

8. “It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, it’s the poor what gets the blame.’ I.”

— Alistair Cooke

9. “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.”

— Alistair Cooke

10. “Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.”

— Alistair Cooke

11. “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

12. “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.”

— Alistair Cooke

13. “Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don’t believe it of any other sport but their own.”

— Alistair Cooke

14. “The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.”

— Alistair Cooke

15. “It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.”

— Alistair Cooke

16. “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

17. “I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.”

— Alistair Cooke

18. “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.”

— Alistair Cooke

19. “If computers take over, it will serve us right.”

— Alistair Cooke

20. “They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.”

— Alistair Cooke

21. “Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.”

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

23. “Las Vegas is Everymans 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 emperors orgy is now a democratic institution. Topless Pizza Lunch.”

— Alistair Cooke

24. “To get an elementary grasp of the game of golf, a human must learn, by endless practice, a continuous and subtle series of highly unnatural movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.”

— Alistair Cooke

25. “Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.”

— Alistair Cooke

26. “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.”

— Alistair Cooke

27. “It’s an acting job – acting natural.”

— Alistair Cooke

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Americans are less mystical about what produced their inland or meadow courses; they are the product of the bulldozerm rotary ploughs, mowers, sprinkler systems and alarmingly generous wads of folding money.”

— Alistair Cooke

32. “I talk to my typewriter and that is what I’ve been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.”

— Alistair Cooke

33. “But afterall it’s not the winning that matters, is it? Or is it? It’sto coinawordtheamenitiesthatcount: thesmell of the dandelions, the puff of the pipe, the click of the bat, the rain on the neck, the chill down the spine, the slow, exquisite coming on of sunset and dinner and rheumatism.”

— Alistair Cooke

34. “People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.”

— Alistair Cooke

35. “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.”

— Alistair Cooke

36. “Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.”

— Alistair Cooke

37. “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

38. “Washington’s birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.”

— Alistair Cooke

39. “No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.”

— Alistair Cooke

40. “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

41. “In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.”

— Alistair Cooke

42. “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

43. “It rose slowly like a gull sensing a reckless blue fish to close to the surface, and then it dived relentlessly for the green, kicked and stopped three feet short of the flag.”

— Alistair Cooke

44. “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.”

— Alistair Cooke

45. “Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeless 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.”

— Alistair Cooke