Cleveland Amory Quotations

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.

The facts of life are very stubborn things.

There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.

The New England conscience does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't-it just stops you from enjoying it.

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.

A "good" family, it seems, is one that used to be better.

The customer is always right! John Wanamaker must be turning in his grave. If you're a customer today, you're an intruder.

I told the good Father that if he and I were going in the future to some wonderful Elysian Field and the animals were not going to go anywhere, that was all the more reason to give them a little better shake in the one life they did have.

I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors.

In my day the schools taught two things, love of country and penmanship-now they don't teach either.

Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they're just like a schoolboy with a new girl.

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days?

People ask me what makes a good funeral, and I tell them the most important thing is your man in the casket. If you have a man of substance in there, you have the makings of a first-class funeral.

Giving the cat a name, like marriage, is not an easy thing. Soon I experienced the selection of name for a baby, a dog, a book, a warship, a sports team, even the king, the pope or a hurricane is just child's play compared to the selection of the cat's name.

I can't take a well-tanned person seriously.

You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The facts of life are very stubborn things.

The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose.

It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.

Relations between the sexes are so complicated that the only way you can tell if members of the set are going together is if they are married. Then, almost certainly, they are not.

I will omit but I will not distort.

It suddenly dawned on me one day, when I was reading in the paper about a woman wrestler, that being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that a man can be that a woman cannot be. Women can be irritating -- after all, they are women -- but they cannot be curmudgeons.

There are only two ways out for animals at pounds--being adopted or being killed. And cats have such a low rate of adoption that many pounds, even in some larger cities, don't bother to take them in at all. Not for nothing is it always the "dog pound" and never the "cat pound.

You do not need to belong to the cat for a long time to realize the main thing that cats like to do is to wrap theirselves up in mystery, perhaps only except for a hobby of jumbling up everything that is in order. And if the cat can, and usually so, make a great mystery of where it was when you were searching for it even if a moment ago it was sitting by your side, do not have any doubts: its ancestors had a great pleasure to surround its origin by mystery.

Opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.

You cannot expect everything even from the friendliest cat. It is still a cat.

It has long been a theory of mine and I am known, if I do say so, for my long theories that authors, generally speaking, are rotten letter writers.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the Republicans are Socialists and the Democrats are Bolsheviks.

...one of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping.

Support your right to arm bears.

I have read a great deal about what animals dream, but none of it has ever really satisfied me. I believe they dream exactly the way we dream, and about everything in their lives--that they have good dreams and bad dreams in almost direct proportion, as we do, to whether their lives have been more good than bad. Unfortunately, because the majority of animals have it so much tougher than we do, I believe that the majority of dreams, except in the most fortunate petdom, are bad.

To anyone who has ever been owned by a cat, it will come as no surprise that there are all sorts of things about your cat you will never, as long as you live, forget. Not the least of these is your first sight of him or her.

Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize - especially when it comes to what he wants to eat.

On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, new summaries, 6 October 1955. You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

You can give of your talent, you can give of your possessions, or you can give of yourself. For God's sake, give something.

Cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize...that we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions.

I've always had a sneaking fondness for Martin Van Buren. He wrote his autobiography, you know, and never once mentioned his wife. Now that's what I call a mans man.

I consider the 3 most cruelly produced foods to be from lobsters, dropped alive into boiling water, veal from calves separated from their mothers and kept in crates, and pate de foie gras.

Unlike some people who have experienced the loss of an animal, I did not believe, even for a moment, that I would never get another. I did know full well that there were just too many animals out there in need of homes for me to take what I have always regarded as the self-indulgent road of saying the heartbreak of the loss of an animal was too much ever to want to go through with it again. To me, such an admission brought up the far more powerful admission that all the wonderful times you had with your animal were not worth the unhappiness at the end.

What this world needs is a new kind of army - the army of the kind.

For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.

You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.