Alistair Cooke

“A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.”

“Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”

“Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.”

“A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.”

“The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.”

“A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.”

“Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.”

“Humor is the shock absorber of life; it helps us take the blows.”

“I seem to have been born with a colossal talent for rhetoric, and that is a talent of a writer, not of a thinker.”

“Hollywood, it has been said, is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.”

“He had the sort of face that appears when you pack a suitcase in a hurry.”

“The uncanny thing is that the people who see conspiracy theories in everything are themselves invariably conspirators.”