When a cat died, a wise Egyptian tried to be someplace else so that he couldn’t be accused of murder.
— Herodotus
Category: Animal Quotes
Mr. Breeze
Quote: Christopher Hitchens on Cats
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.
— Christopher Hitchens
Quote: Heinlein on Cats
There is no such thing as “Just a cat.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
Quote: Joanna Lumley on Cats
My mother early on taught us to respect all animals, and I mean all animals – not just cats and dogs but rats and snakes and spiders and fish and wildlife, so I really grew up believing they are just like us and just as deserving of consideration.
— Joanna Lumley
Quote: Rebecca West on Cats
Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
— Rebecca West
Quote: Bob Mortimer on Cats
I can’t remember ever cooking food to impress a woman. The idea’s quite cheesy and sort of makes my skin crawl. But I sometimes make a special effort to impress my cats, with chicken liver or something. It’s tricky to know if a cat’s impressed. They might give me a little look, a glimpse at least. That’s cat ownership for you.
— Bob Mortimer
Quote: William S. Burroughs on Cats as Familiars
Cats didn’t start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.
—William S. Burroughs, “The Cat Inside“
Quote: Oleg Gazenko On Laika
Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.
— Russian scientist Oleg Gazenko, 1998, speaking about Laika, the first dog in space.
Quote: Milan Kundera on Dogs and Eden
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.
— Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being“
Quote: Lewis Thomas On Meddling
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“
The Anipal Times 