Alistair Cooke

"In life no such colour brightened the grey picture of a man devoted to the daily study of warfare on several continents with all the ardour of a certified public accountant."

"Even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet. In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. And it would be a crime against …"

"composes a night-time image of Babylon in the desert. But it 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 …"

"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."

"One hundred years after the Declaration that 'all men are created equal,' there began to gather in Newport a colony of the rich, determined to show that some Americans were conspicuously more equal th…"

"During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market…"

"Some people say we are on the verge of the Second Civil War. And it may be so. But even on the darkest days, cheerfulness kept breaking in. I am not by nature a 'Whither America?' man."

"Probably, I wound up—if not as a jack-of-all-trades—at best as a thirdrate polymath never able to focus these curiosities into a commanding “view of life.” The most practical solution appeared to be t…"