Cleveland Amory Quotes

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.

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

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

The people that set one animal against another haven't the guts to be bullies themselves. They're just secondhand cowards.

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.

A person has an idea about foreign policy or doesn't know one’s arse from one’s elbow.

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

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. -Cleveland Amory

For, as William Dean Howells once noted, “Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself,” and it is only a step from this to arrive at something which passes muster for a Society definition of America: that all men may be born equal but most of us spend the better part of our born days in trying to be as unequal as we can. —Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society?

You won't find the word happy in any self-respecting grumbler's dictionary, no matter it's Christmas Eve or the any other day.

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.

Occasionally he’d get a letter like the one in 1947 from the silly attorney in Ohio, chastising him for his parsimonious treatment of his Negro valet, Rochester, and threatening to sue on Rochester’s behalf. But as Cleveland Amory pointed out in the Saturday Evening Post, the real Rochester wasn’t complaining: he “has never been anybody’s valet, has a block-large estate and three servants of his own, drives an expensive car and a big station wagon, and, when not working—which he does two days a week for some $700 per air-time minute—spends his leisure hours either yachting or supervising his well-stocked racing stable.

I have been extremely positive with almost all new people. And why, let me ask, shan't I be? When you think, you have a lot of to say for someone you know for a short time.

When you are communicating with new people you do not have to know their names — after all, you've just met.