Cleveland Amory (September 2, 1917 – October 14, 1998) was an American author who devoted his life to promoting animal rights. He was perhaps best known for his books about his cat, named Polar Bear, whom he saved from the Manhattan streets on Christmas Eve 1977. The executive director of the Humane Society of the United States described Amory as "the founding father of the modern animal protection movement." Amory was also a social commentator on NBC's Today show for 11 years, a guest stint that ended in 1963. That same year he became chief critic for TV Guide, a position he held until 1976. He was also a columnist for The Saturday Review and for some time broadcast a daily radio essay on Curmudgeon at Large. He was a senior contributing editor of Parade Magazine from 1980 until his death. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A 'good' family, it seems, is one that used to be better.
A person has an idea about foreign policy or doesn't know one's arse from one's elbow.
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
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
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?
I can't take a well-tanned person seriously.
I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors.
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 man's man.
If you're a customer today, you're an intruder.
In my day the schools taught two things, love of country and penmanship- now they don't teach either.
One of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping.
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.
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.
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.
There are three terrible ages of childhood- 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.
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.
You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The facts of life are very stubborn things. (On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson)
You cannot expect everything even from the friendliest cat. It is still a cat.
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.
Categories: Cleveland Amory, Quotes of the day
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