Alistair Cooke Quotes (1908-2004)

“America had a fling at National Socialism. Roosevelt was for all administration purposes a dictator, but a benevolent one, and the country loved 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.”

“Las Vegas is Everyman’s 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 emperor’s orgy is now a democratic institution…. “Topless Pizza Lunch.””

“LSD ... is one of the company of drugs now known as hallucinogens, and there is no doubt that in some people it produces exquisite visions. The big question is whether they are of the outer or inner world, whether in fact they heighten or deepen reality or fool the taker into believing that the kind of vision a madman sees is the real world that convention, habit, or sheer blunting of instinct hide from him.”

“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.”

“I hope I won't be misunderstood if I say that he was a most un-American figure because he was so remarkably self-effacing. The United States has as many people as anybody afflicted with selfeffacement, but it usually springs from social discomfort or genuine shyness, for all that other form of shyness which, as somebody wisely said, is a sure sign of conceit. This man was not shy, but at the subordination of selfless teamwork was almost an instinct with him, and I suppose few men who take to soldiering took it for a better reason. Most Americans were willing to credit reports of his eminence but it was something they had to take on trust, for General George Catlett Marshall, of all the great figures of our time, was the least "colorful", the least impressive in a casual meeting and the least rewarding to the collector of anecdotes. He was a man whose inner strength and secret humour only slowly dripped through the surfaces of life, as a stalactite hangs stiff and granity for centuries before one sees beneath it a pool of still water of marvelous purity.”

“He was a superman and yet his legs were spindly. He was a big florid man, yet all his movements were dainty as a squirrel's. He was gentle to children and could be blasphemous to adults. He was Hercules with bat in hand, but he was Hercules done by Disney. And this unfailing whimsicality, of gesture and mood, tempered by the inhumanity of his skill, made him at one with his audience, made it possible, in the subtle Chaplin way, for the lame and fumbling and the mousy to see in him the embodiment of their delusions of power and fame.”

“Moving among wretched people in mean places, as I often saw him do, he had the impulses of a saint but not the serenity.”

“Every man's harmless fantasy mistress. By being worshiped by the entire world she gave you the feeling that if your imagination had to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste.”

“Cooke is a nuisance. He telephones his copy at the last moment, so that everything else has to be dropped to get it into the paper. He says that he will be in Chicago and turns up in Los Angeles. He discards the agreed subject to write about something which has taken his fancy, news of the moment or not. But we think he’s worth it, and we love him just the same.”