Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill scoured by a whiff of arrogance
—Alistair Cooke
Topics: Golf
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.
—Alistair Cooke
Topics: Experts, Doing Your Best, Professionalism
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
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
Topics: Compliments
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
Topics: Curiosity
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
—Alistair Cooke
Topics: Prophecy
All Presidents start out pretending 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
Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.
—Alistair Cooke
Topics: Curiosity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Edward R. Murrow American Journalist
- Walter H. Annenberg American Publisher
- Simon Wiesenthal Austrian Nazi-Hunter
- Louis L’Amour American Novelist
- Spike Milligan Irish Humorist
- George Harrison English Singer
- Vincent Price American Actor
- Duke Ellington American Musician
- Arthur Rubinstein American Pianist
- Bob Hope British-born American Comedian, Film Actor
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