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

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

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

— Alistair Cooke

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

— Alistair Cooke

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.

— Alistair Cooke

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

— 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

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

— Alistair Cooke

Santa Claus, this psychiatrist says, is a dangerous sentimental father-figure, who is expected to satisfy "unreasonable wants," and who by that very expectation delays the "necessary adjustment of the preadolescent child to the world of reality."

— Alistair Cooke