Alistair Cooke quotes

There is at least one generation of Americans growing up that not only does not have much respect for diversity of opinion but doesn't know what it is. It is only a step to believing that what is strange or unreported by fifty newspapers is somehow mischievous or "un-American." Once every man reads the same things as his neighbor, and thinks the same thought, the common man is here with a vengeance: that is to say, the mass bigot.
Alistair Cooke - The Saturday Review

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

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

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.
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

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

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. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumble and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah.
Alistair Cooke

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