Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external cause? Look at overpopulation, look at Calhoun’s famous model, those overcrowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do is find the meddler, in this case Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will put itself right. The trouble with those rats is not the innate tendency of crowded rats to go wrong, but the scientists who took them out of the world at large and put them in too small a box.
— Lewis Thomas, “The Medusa and the Snail“
Author: Mr. Breeze
I do be a kitteh. I haz a blog.
Quote: H. P. Lovecraft on Cats
The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
— H. P. Lovecraft, “Cats and Dogs“, in “Something About Cats and Other Pieces“
Quote: Groucho Marx on Books
Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend because inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
— Groucho Marx
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Quote: Franz Kafka on Leopards
Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
— Franz Kafka
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Quote: Ernest Hemingway on Cats
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
— Ernest Hemingway
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Animals in Shakespeare
Did you know that William Shakespeare (April 1564 – April 23, 1616) was one of the first playwrights to write in English for regular people, rather than in French (the Lingua franca) or Latin?
Shakespeare wrote lots of animals into his plays. Here are just a few.
- “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child” King Lear Act 1, Scene 4, 281–289
- “Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew and dog will have his day” Hamlet Act V, Scene I
- “Cry ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war” Julius Caesar (1599) Act III Scene I
- “By this reckoning he is more shrew than she.” Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, Scene 1
- “I am as vigilant as a cat to steal cream.” King Henry the Fourth, Act IV., Scene 2
- “Thou call’st me dog before thou hadst a cause, But since I am a dog, beware my fangs” The Merchant of Venice
If you haven’t read Shakespeare, download the totally free ebook at Project Gutenberg, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
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