Cleveland Amory Quotes

The facts of life are very stubborn things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I will omit but I will not distort.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Support your right to arm bears.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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